You probably know already but more Tit’s & Penises are now in World’s End shop.
The square t-shirts mentioned in an earlier post ‘Chaos’, ‘Cowboys’, ‘Do it yourself’ & ‘Tits’  are the prints available, price £50.
Also available are the penis pins £35. The black one has sold out already (black penis has always been popular) but try the blue,yellow,white or pink. Also the penis safety pin version.
Penises have been a Westwood symbol for a long time now. The first time I saw it used was on the Marilyn Monroe ‘Piss’ punk t-shirt which had the print of red penis dildos on the sleeves. I asked my mum if she didn`t like Marilyn, putting ‘piss’ on her face but she told me that wasn’t the case, she just wanted to shock people.
After that I think the next time it was used was as rubber buttons on the Buffalo & Witches collections & later I remember it being used with flying wings as one of the t-shirt prints for the free Leonard Peltier campaign.
Try one out for yourself. Pin a penis pin on your tit t-shirt.

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Tom with Princess Anne & Me

It is one of the first warm sunny days this year when Johannes & I visit Tom, but it is even hotter in his workshop. The hat blocks or ‘pans’ (aluminium moulds) that are integral to hat making are gas heated & kept at a constant temperature when they are being used, & they generate quite a bit of heat! It creates the same effect for us as walking into a kitchen with gas cookers blasting away on all jets. We are soon stripping off.
Originally from Dublin & a tailor by trade at age14, Tom entered the hat business when he married, his wife being from a family hat trade called Bedworth’s in London. During the Blitz, to avoid the bombing they & most of the other London hat manufacturers relocated to Luton (the straw used for making hats had been grown in the surrounding area since the 1800’s) making Luton the present centre of the hat trade in Britain.
When Tom took control of the company he originally expanded, employing 25 people & relocating to a bigger premises but 4/5 years later he changed tactics & reduced numbers again. The hat business in Britain has been changing. Nowadays most of the felt ‘hoods’ (‘hood’ is the name given to the rough dome shaped body of the hat) come from abroad. Quality hoods come from Hungary & of course China has been taking over a lot of the markets. They now grow most of the straw & produce the hoods for straw hats (there used to be 6 suppliers of straw in Britain but now there is only one) & they have also taken on most of the large quantity orders in finished hat production. Tom’s business therefore caters mainly to small quantity orders but for lots of different people (these include Philip Tracy & Child of the Jago) & he himself keeps a hands on approach making the hats himself with only a small team to help him, generally working a 14 hour day from 7.30am to 9.30pm.
Tom’s first work with a Westwood design was in 1982 when he made the felt bowler hats for the ‘Savages’ collection & then after that he made the mountain hats for the ‘Buffalo Girls’ collection. As it goes after 30 years of making innumerable hats for Westwood, the mountain hat is still a best seller & is the hat that he has made the most of for us.
The first process in making a straw hat is to have the ‘hoods’ dyed to the colour required (the felt hoods are supplied already dyed). There is a dyer in Luton so Tom sends them there. The dyer also applies a new EU standard PVA stiffener before returning the hoods to Tom to be ‘blocked’.
This involves the hood first being soaked in water & then stretched by hand over the block to the size required. The hoods only come in one size so for a big hat (like a giant bowler or John Bull hat) a lot of stretching is needed & this is hard work (if the hat is too big then it has to be built up from sections sewn together). After this the two or more sections of the heated ‘pans’ are clamped together & left for a while until the hat has dried whereupon the body of the hat is finished. All that is needed now is for the hat to be trimmed & the hatband & label to be sewn in.
Tom has two children who both worked with him for a while but neither of them wanted to make a life of it & so the daughter took a degree in computer science & the son is now a property developer. Funny enough we meet the son as he is in the process of developing the end section of Tom’s workshop building, no longer needed for hats. However Tom has no plans to retire (joking that it stops him drinking too much). He likes his job. I didn’t ask him but I can tell.
Thank you Tom…
A new order of straw John Bull hats are in World’s End shop now.

Straw Mountain hats

Blocking the hood

Blocking the hood

John Bull hats

Bowler hat_Savages collection 1982

John Bull Straw

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You might have noticed the new DIY section by now. We want to inspire and encourage you to make things yourself. Stephen has sent us the first reply with a picture of the drape shirt he made. To make this shirt you need a little experience. The crown is very easy to make.

“Here’s my version of the drape shirt I made from the pattern I downloaded from the Worlds End blog, I used a really crisp shell cloth which drapes beautifully and I even used up some old brown Westwood buttons to finish. I’m a firm believer in DO IT YOURSELF and make about 45% of my own clothes because I work as a pattern cutter, so I'm used to sampling and sewing toiles. The rest of my wardrobe is about 50% Vivienne Westwood and the rest is thrifed, I really appreciate how Vivienne cuts her cloth from twisted fly’s on trousers to off centre necks on shirts and tops!”

Steven     http://polishchrist.tumblr.com/

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Gigot dress

In the World’s End shop are 3 dresses, the ‘Gigot Dress’ (and blouse), the ‘Balloon Dress’, and the ‘Gipsy Dress’. Vivienne specifically picked these 3 dresses from her GLSS12 show because she loves them & thinks you should too, implementing the shop’s philosophy of supplying select pieces chosen by Vivienne for you.
All the dresses come in white, the Gigot also in black and navy.
Made from light cotton voile and washed to give a soft/creased finish, the white dresses are all rather transparent which requires an element of bravery perhaps.
However this Dress is perfect for a warm day by the sea – simple, light, and elegant…& apart from that how about causing a stir in town? Wear some nice lingerie underneath one of them which would be visible & show yourself off.
The dresses feature unfinished edges by using the selvedge of the cloth itself (term describing the self-finished edges of woven fabric. Self-edge).
Lisa has torn a strip off her Gigot dress to make it shorter, but I think it’s great long. Also care is easy, you can hand wash it   and just hang it, it will dry in no time.
Gigot Dress, Balloon Dress, Gipsy Dress – £295.00

Balloon dress GLSS12 show

Gigot dress_Navy

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Malcolm McLaren outside 430 Kings Road

I lived on & off with Malcolm for 15 years from age 3. In all that time it was always clear to me that he would rather be on his own with my mother without having me (or my half-brother) around, therefore when he & my mum split up I was not too unhappy.
After this I did not see Malcolm often. I would bump into him occasionally at some event or other but when I did it was a bit uncomfortable really & we didn’t say much.
However time goes by & sometime towards the end of the 1990’s when I bumped into him again it coincided with a period when I had been thinking to myself about how much better it had been that Malcolm had been in my life rather than not having been & I told him this. This broke the ice with him & we arranged to meet again at my old studio in Battersea.
So one humid June afternoon Malcolm arrived wearing a white linen suit, I made us both tea & we talked…a lot.
The room that we talked in was the main room of the studio & having previously been a school gymnasium it had a glass gabled roof. At one point in the afternoon the heavens opened & a torrential tropical-feeling thunderstorm rained down on the glass making a sound like radio static & creating a temporary lake outside the front door (in fact it completely flooded a nearby road to a depth of about two feet). We paused & when the rain had subsided Malcolm asked me if he had ever told me the story of how he first got the shop in Kings Road which is now the World’s End.
What he said was that on this particular day (in 1971) he was feeling really cooped up in the flat we lived in, in Clapham, ‘remember you couldn’t swing a cat round in that place’ he said. He had no money & it was ‘one of those days’. So not having any particular plan he decided that the only thing was to get dressed up in his favourite new powder blue teddy boy suit & to go for a walk down the nearby Kings Road. At one point when he had got to the World’s End section of the road (this is the name of the area. It was used later as the name of the shop) it suddenly started raining heavily & not wanting to spoil his suit he took shelter in a public telephone box. So there he was when all of a sudden a man came over & explaining that Malcolm looked interesting, invited him over to his shop across the road, number 430…..
By the time he left the owner had invited Malcolm to come back & sell anything he wanted as long as he took no more space in the shop than one square foot on the floor which he could have.
Malcolm was excited by this offer & returned soon after with some old records & I think magazines to sell.
A couple of weeks went by then the owner suddenly mentioned to Malcolm that he had to go away for a bit & giving Malcolm the keys asked him to look after the shop. He never came back!
So now Malcolm had the whole shop for free & having realised that he couldn’t only sell old records he got my mum to start knocking up some clothes (which started that ball rolling too) & customising some others.
Three months went by then one day the landlord turned up wondering why he hadn’t had any rent for a bit. The first Malcolm knew of it (I don’t think he opened any of the mail) was when he heard a man knocking on the door telling him to ‘open up it’s the landlord’. At first he completely panicked about this & he tried keeping quiet at the back of the shop & keeping the door closed but the landlord wasn’t going away & kept knocking so after a while he realised there was nothing else to do & he opened the door.
The landlord was ok though & hearing the story of what had happened & of the previous owner’s disappearance he cut a deal with Malcolm to start paying rent from that day & so Malcolm kept the shop & that is the story!

430 Kings Road 1970/71

‘Let it Rock’ 430 Kings Rd

Malcolm McLaren inside ‘Let it Rock’

Malcolm McLaren inside ‘Let it Rock’

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For the s/s 09 ‘Do it Yourself’ Gold label fashion show in Paris in October 08, a rough square t-shirt was reintroduced.
A very simple t-shirt in its construction, being in essence two squares (or rectangles) sewn together at the sides & shoulders (leaving holes for the head & arms), the t-shirt featured edges not turned inside (bagged) & not over locked but still of strong construction & the edges do not fray. The design perfectly reflected the ethos of the collection (see below) as these t-shirts could be made by anybody (you wouldn’t really even need to use a sewing machine, the edges could be safety pinned together for instance).
Although this was the first time these t-shirts were shown on a catwalk it was not an original idea as this design had first been developed by Vivienne in 1974/5 for her & Malcolm’s incarnation of the Kings Road shop as ‘SEX’ which promoted fetish rubberwear & pornographic imagery in an attempt to shock the rather stuffy establishment of the time (& shock it did. I remember a news story about a man who had been arrested under the obscene publications act because he was walking up the Kings Road wearing a nude ‘Cowboys’ print. He had been stopped & told to take it off straight away & when he refused he was arrested. After this the shop suffered several months of weekly raids by the police who would confiscate the entire stock every time only for it to be immediately replaced after they had gone by more t-shirts kept in bin liners in the upstairs toilet. The shop was not making much of a profit at this time but the ‘message’ was being made & you won’t get into so much trouble wearing them now)
The first square t-shirt was created because one of the prints Vivienne & Malcolm wanted to produce was an extract from some pornographic/fetish literature of the time (the t-shirt was called the ‘I groaned with pain’ after the first line of the script) & being written on a rectangular page Vivienne thought of the idea of making the t-shirt square as well (below is a photograph where you can see Paul Cook, the drummer of the Sex Pistols who is on the left wearing one).
Other prints which were produced included the aforementioned ‘Cowboys’ print as well as the ‘Tits’, ’Baseballer’(nude), ‘Vive le Rock’, ‘Fuck’(with nude young man smoking cigarette), ‘Destroy’, ‘Cambridge rapist’ & the ‘You’re going to wake up one morning & know what side of the bed you’ve been lying on’ which then had a list of ‘good’ people & ‘bad’ people.
The rough design also reflected the punk ethos of the time which already advocated making your own outfits.
Back to the present day & in World’s End now we have the ‘Climate Revolution’ print. In the shop for about the last six months, you may already have seen it. It’s the one that was made to do the climate revolution stunt at the Paralympics last year & was sub sequentially given to Lady Gaga who wore it for her visit to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy last year.
Next week three new/old versions will be available to add to this revisited classic, ‘Tits’, ‘Cowboys’ & ‘Chaos’ & then later this September two new designs will be added, the ‘69 print’(with lightning bolt on the reverse) & the new ‘Do it Yourself’ print. Both of these later t-shirts will be lot larger than the previous ones & can therefore also be worn as a dress if you should so wish.
………..& hopefully you won`t be arrested for wearing them. Good luck

‘Do it Yourself’ ethos

‘I groaned with pain’

The Sex Pistols

‘You’re going to wake up one morning’ t-shirt

new ’69′ t-shirt

new ’69′ t-shirt

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Bondage Boot Evolution

This is to introduce the latest addition to the Bondage boot range, the Elevated Bondage Boot.
Altogether there have been 6 versions in it’s evolution starting with the ‘Seditionaries Boot’ first produced in 1976 & sold in the shop ‘Seditionaries’ (the previous incarnation of World’s End). At this time there were two styles to choose from. A pointed toed full leather version with studs at the front & the canvas & leather mix version which is the one which has evolved over the years to the present day.
My mother has told me that she designed the boot whilst the shop was closed for it’s refurbishment from ‘Sex’ into ‘Seditionaries’ in 1977 & that she had thought it was so good that she had gone to see Grace Coddington the photo editor of British Vogue to see if she was interested in doing a piece on them. Grace’s reaction had been one of disinterest & nothing was done with the boot but ironically my mother noticed that at the time of her visit Grace was wearing a copy of the mohair jumper she had designed for the shop ‘Sex’. Just confirming really how ‘behind’ ‘Vogue’ has always been.
Also she mentioned that the boot was being worn by Malcolm’s new project The Sex Pistols at this early stage, they therefore were among the first people to wear them.
I have had a look on the internet to find any old photos of people wearing these first boots & I discovered one of Johnny Thunders in ‘The Heartbreakers’ wearing a pair (The Heartbreakers had been a support group to the Sex Pistols on the Anarchy Tour in December 76. Johnny had been in the New York Dolls before this). Johnny is the one on the right (See photo).
The first time that the design was revised was about 10 years ago for the s/s2002 Nymphs collection when a high heeled version was made with moulded toes at the front. This was called the Bondage boot for the first time.
In 2005 for the autumn/winter Propaganda collection a version was made with a rounder toe & the (Battersea) Power Station heel. Then for the s/s 2011 collection a similar version was shown but this time it had a very high heel & was called the ‘Skyscrapper’.
Back to the present day & the new additions to be available in World’s End this week.
The Elevated Bondage Boot will be available in 3 different colour ways of the squiggle print. Brown leather with brown squiggle,brown leather with navy squiggle & white leather with red squiggle (although this colour way will be in the shop a bit later, in about 3 weeks). These will retail at £465.
The Bondage (toe) boot & the Seditionaries boot (flat sole) already available in black leather with grey, red, khaki & black canvas are to be joined by a new colour way based on the original 1977 boot, tan leather with green canvas. These retail at £375 for the Bondage Boot & £355 for the Seditionaries Boot.

Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers

Seditionaries Boot 1977_All leather

Elevated Bondage Boot 2013

Bondage Boots 2013

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Kathrin & the Africa Bags

I get a chance to speak to Kathrin about the Ethical Fashion bag project in Africa in the middle of a busy time for her. As I enter she is in the process of choosing which colour way looks the best for a new range of prints for the next collection of Westwood bags (Kathrin deals with the whole Westwood bag range including the Gold label) along with Joe the whiz kid computer, creative boffin (what to call him?) who has been with the company for about 17 years now. Stripes of differently coloured & sized leopard print now balance together; the final thing is to choose the background colour that the stripes will blend harmoniously together into. It seems to be a choice between an orangey brown & a bluish grey. Joe seems to know what he would choose but Kathrin is undecided so Alex is called in to give his opinion (Alex deals with all print designs for accessories & overseas licensing), the bluish grey is chosen.
Kathrin has been to Africa to build up the Westwood involvement with the Ethical Fashion Programme two times now, she hopes to go a third time this coming May. The first visit was to Kenya in April 2011 when she went with amongst others, Vivienne, Andreas, Jurgen Teller the photographer, Simone Cipriani from the ITC & Marion Hume a journalist who works for the UN.
Vivienne was the first designer to work with the programme so this was the trip that really set up the work model as to what could be done & what was still needed.
An instance of this is that the culture in Kenya, traditionally based around hand crafts such as embroidery, bead making & weaving on non electrical looms (the main reason for this being the lack of an electrical supply in rural areas), had necessitated a workshop called ‘The GoDown’ being set up by the UN in an area on the edge of Nairobi, supplied with electric sewing machines. However this was a new skill & the workers had to be trained to use the machines to a high level (straight lines, not crooked) & tutored in the tailoring construction techniques required for a top end fashion product. Kathrin’s roots as a tailor gave her this task although she did mention that some of the `mistakes` in the stitching did actually give her some new ideas..
When she was young, growing up in Germany, Kathrin’s father had impressed on her the importance of the Bauhaus philosophy of learning the in depth craft/ technical understanding alongside designing in any field. So being interested in clothes she decided to study tailoring. As it went she found that she also had an interest in making bags but hadn’t thought that this could be a job on its own…
Altogether Kathrin spent 2 weeks in Kenya this first time. She had only been given notice that she would be going to Africa 10 days before she had to depart so it had been a bit of a struggle to get everything organised in time including having to have all her vaccination shots in one go which didn’t make her feel so great.
Whilst she was there she visited several locations in the country where different groups of workers were based such as the Masai in the Rift Valley.
One of these trips involved a 6 hour drive each way for a 2 hour meeting. She was a bit apprehensive about this trip as the time to depart on the day they had decided on had moved later & later in the day until it became clear that they would be driving at night. It is not a good idea to drive at night apparently as there are no lights on the roads & it is easy to hit an animal, a hole in the road or worst of all another person. Also there are dangerous people about, the German embassy had advised against travelling at night due to the danger of hostage takings.
Eventually they decided to make the trip the next morning.
The way that ideas are thought of for the bags is that first of all what is available to be used in their construction is presented.
This is still the process & I am presented by Kathrin in the Battersea office with an ‘ideas’ box sent from Nairobi.
In it are a selection of crotchet & embroidery samples, examples of beads made from local glass, recycled paper & the rubber soles of flip flops. Swatches of canvas & synthetic fabrics (the cut offs & remnants from a local tent & shelter solutions industry in the city) are there & then there are some examples of weaving using plastic drinking straws & polypropylene/plastic strapping.
From this Kathrin had the idea of making zip pulls from surplus electrical wiring & from strips of plastic braided. Also an idea for a bag made from weaving strips of plastic carrier bags together.. (See the ‘African bits’ photo).
The metalwork on the bags is made from recycled metal recast & worked in a workshop in the township of Kibera on the edge of Nairobi (Kibera is the largest shantytown in the world)
The ideas for the bags are not solely made by the Westwood team however. It was decided to let the aesthetic sensibilities of the workers in Africa also to play their part in order to give an African touch to the designs. This mainly involves the workers making their own choices as to the colour ways used in the printing & embroidery.
This also means that each bag is different & therefore unique.
The purpose of the Ethical Fashion Initiative in Africa is to give work to marginalised people such as single mothers, widows, HIV/AIDS victims and those living in extreme poverty. The focus is on women, responding to evidence that women are more likely to invest their wage in their families. The wages for the workers on the program are not a survival wage, but a decent wage, which allows them to live in a dignified way. So far the initiative has supported 7000 women, providing training in craft and manufacturing skills as required.
`Not charity, just work` is the initiative’s slogan, working on the principle that charity makes people dependant whereas a decent wage gives people more control over their lives. This means that they can choose not to over exploit their environment. A widespread form of earning money to date has been the cutting down of trees to make charcoal to sell.
A range of Africa bags is available in World’s End & the other Westwood shops.

African Bits

Outside the GoDown center

Inside the GoDown

Masai

efa-report-july-2012

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Me backstage Paralypics

Hello
My name is Ben & I am Vivienne’s son by her first marriage to my father Derek.
I have just recently taken on this job to write the World’s End shop blog & I thought that I should take this opportunity to introduce myself.
I have actually worked for my mother before, for about 6months in 1983 just after the Buffalo Girls collection during the Punkature & Witches period, then after the split up with Malcolm I worked in the period 1986-1990 when she first developed herself as an independent designer.
During this time I multi-tasked quite a bit as at the beginning of this period there were only myself, my brother Joe & my mother’s mother Dora working for the company. I could drive so I got the driving & clothes production job, Joe (pretty sharp with money as you may know) dealt with finances & worked in the shop, & my grandmother worked in the shop too.
In 1987 I went to the USA for a couple of months & on my return I worked in the shop myself, then when the Davies St shop opened I was it’s first manager. In 1989 I was back doing production during the Civilizade & Voyage to Cythera period. I finally finished in March 1990.
In the intervening 23 years until now I developed my own project as a fetish photographer. After an adolescence surrounded by punk girls in stockings, suspenders & thigh high boots, Jordan working in SEX in her rubber underwear, Malcolm’s big collection of fetish & pin-up magazines that he & my mum used for their t-shirts, lying around at home; & then during the `Pagan Years` 86-90, Sara & all those supermodels wearing corsets, stockings & suspenders again,……& all those high heel shoes & boots….I knew what I wanted to do….so I did it.
I didn’t have the most lucrative career, I  suppose my photos were too specific a subject to have a regular job as a photographer. However I did have 3 books of my work published (the last one called `F**k Fashion`), did several exhibitions, worked for a variety of magazines from the art/fashion side like `Tank` to lads & porn mags like `Loaded` & `Leg Sex`. I also did the photos for a Lastminute.com advertising campaign & for a month or so I saw massive billboards of my work all around London.
Apart from that, I’ve been involved with some political stunts to do with opposition to obscenity laws. At the beginning of 2009 I marched around Parliament Square with a group of bondage models in opposition to Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, which banned “extreme pornography” & then at the end of the same year I sang (terribly) carols outside the home of the Labour Equalities Minister Harriet Harman with a group of latex clad Xmas girls against the sexual encounter licence being proposed for clubs.
At the end of 2011 I was involved with the Occupy demonstration at St Paul’s & did an interview in the Evening Standard about it.
Last year & at the last minute I was asked by my mum to join her, my brother Joe & my father in law Andreas (he’s younger than me) in her stunt at the Paralympics, so I put on my woad war paint ( I chose my design from a film with Robert Redford called Jeremiah Johnson. One of the Crow Indians in it had it), my Guantanamo overalls and the climate revolution t-shirt I was to reveal & joined the procession on a bright green frog car. A strange experience being in front of so many people. I saw myself in the summing up edit at the end of the show at home on TV but there was a head in front of the t-shirt & when it moved they cut to something else. I was going to keep the t-shirt but I had to give it back so that Lady Gaga could have it. I hadn’t washed it.
Anyway, over the last 3-5 years or so I’ve been at a changing point in my life/career. I haven’t taken any pictures of fetish girls but I have taken some photos for the earlier World’s End blog, new items posts (i.e. the Lion bag & Propaganda boot posts). Also I have done some design work myself & have produced a small range, including 2 coats, a jacket, a shirt & a pair of trousers. The coats & jackets have been available in my brother Joe’s shop `Child of the Jago` for some time now but just recently my mother gave me the ok to put them in World’s End shop, which is quite an honor, really. They are there now…
So back to the present day & my new job here. My take on it is that I am a journalist with a magazine to run, so that as well as posts to do with any new items for sale in the shop I will be drawing on my own experience & archive to write something about the history of the shop. Including interviews, profiles & news of Vivienne’s political work I hope to make this an interesting site to visit regularly.

Yours

Ben Westwood

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John has been the shoemaker for Vivienne Westwood since the beginning of 1987. Originally his father Aresti managed the business & it was he that I first met & dealt with as it was I working for my mother’s production at the time that first found & approached them.
Using the hunch that the best shoemakers in town were Greek, I checked in the Yellow pages & went to visit two or three of them with the brief to make me a sample of the rocking horse boot. Aresti originally from Cyprus did the best job & gave the best price & so started a partnership which I suppose has been rather life changing.
Originally the shoe shop in Roman Road, East London did business by the repair of shoes & by the making of special orders for customers. The shelves in the shop front & the window advertised an interesting range of fetish boots & shoes as it was the fetish scene that were the main clients. However business with Westwood steadily got better & by 1995 they had left the high street shop & moved into an industrial workshop around the corner in Old Ford Rd. From here they devoted their whole business to the Westwood production along with some work for Bella Freud who had worked with Vivienne’s company previously & also with Agent Provocateur (run by Vivienne’s son Joe).During this time John took more of a front seat running the business.
Over the years John reckons that on average they have made 3000 pairs of shoes a year. During the period where they were making the overseas orders for the Japanese company Itochu they were making twice that amount. Until ten years ago they made all the samples for the fashion shows but although invited they did not always attend the show as they were usually too tired. In the last ten years the samples have been made in Italy but just this season they have started doing these again. I ask John which shoes does he remember making the most & he laughs & says that he remembers a sample pair for a show years ago which had rubber vibrators sticking out of their toes. Funny enough this was for the Erotic Zones ss95 show.  
Right at the moment he is making a new order of 5 styles for the World’s End shop including the slave sandal platform which you can see in production in the below photographs. These should be in the shop in a couple of months.
Another thing that makes John laugh are the various characters that have done the driving for the company. He remembers one in particular who was always in such a rush that he nicknamed him `Quicksilver` (I remember this one as well. He had slicked back silver/grey hair, was a member of a western/cowboy club where I think he was the quickest gun & I remember that he never used to use the clutch pedal to change gears on the manual gearbox saying that this was quicker to drive. He went through about 3 gearboxes).
John’s father Aresti retired about 3 years ago & now John works on his own in a new workshop. He has two sons; Stephen (21) is at University studying history & Matthew (18) who is taking A levels. Sometimes at weekends they like to go up to Old Trafford to watch the match as John has a season ticket. He says that he is never bored in the job. He normally starts work about 6.30am finishing about 4.30pm & he has been doing the job so long now that he doesn’t even notice the fumes from the glue & polishes used. `High` or not John’s work has always been to the highest standard & there is nothing shoe ways that he cannot make. So the partnership with Westwood has definitely been a mutually beneficial one. We couldn’t have done without him…

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