It was all for the best, though – the museum has now reopened in larger premises nearby at the London Lighthouse Building.
The story of the collection begins with its founder 68-year-old Robert Opie, variously described as a ‘consumer historian’ or a ‘supermarket archaeologist’, who has spent 50 years collecting historical brands and packaging.
These include items such as tins of Bird’s custard powder, First World War Oxo cubes, KitKats from the 1930s (originally conceived as Chocolate Crisp) and packets of soap powder with much emphasis on which product boils best, as in Daz Boils Whitest Of All. The ordinary objects of everyday life, in fact, which are so often overlooked.
Not by Opie, who prefers to be described as passionate rather than obsessive.
He said recently: “Long ago I realised that this was such a vast subject and there was no record of how all this packaging transformed our lives, so I did it myself.”
Alongside the packaging, you can see toys, TV-tie-ins, posters, advertisements, books and all sorts of written ephemera in the museum.
For would-be collectors, good places to buy such items include the larger antiques fairs, out-of-print book fairs like those run by the PBFA or specialist ephemera events from Etc Fairs or the Ephemera Society.
Also try the top toy fairs organised by Barry Potter, as well as the bigger fleamarkets.
Robert Opie Factfile
- The author of 20 books on the history of advertising and brands, Robert Opie bought the first object in his collection in 1963 – a packet of Munchies from a vending machine in Inverness.
- By 1975 he had enough to mount his first exhibition at the V&A, The Pack Age: A Century of Wrapping It Up. So successful was this that Opie opened his first museum devoted to the history of packaging and advertising at Gloucester Docks in 1984.
- By 2005 the museum had moved to London and is now packed full of objects – hence the move.
- Opie’s canny collecting eye alights on many modern merchandising packaging products, including those promoting the boy band One Direction, from T-shirts to deodorant.
