VINTAGE SNEAKER VAULT UNCOVERED!

If you’ve seen the Doug Pray documentary ‘Scratch’, you may recall the scenes of DJ Shadow gaining ingression to yet another basement of dreams. One of the most magical pieces of the film focuses on the notoriously camera-shy Shadow surrounded by mountains of vinyl relics. Shadow had been a regular at this store in California, just as I had been a returning customer at a local sports store in Streatham, South London called ‘Sports and Things’. Just as it was customary for the Sacramento store clerks to [taunt and] inform the world famous producer of the gems tucked away in their basement, the store owners in London had often teased me and referred to a similar hoard of sneakers. A mass of stock that they had been selling off at irregular intervals over the few years I’d been a customer and further back.

During the summer of 2001, myself and a pal were fortunate enough to be granted access to the stockrooms, yep, that’s plural. At that time, one small storage area had nothing but a desk, a redundant old computer and hundreds and hundreds of pairs of original Stan Smiths. They were strewn all over the floor and piled to the ceiling [this room is now FULL of O.G. Neon Yellow and Cool Grey Air Max ’95, some samples even in leather]. We had a brief excitable yet fanatical look around the other two huge stockrooms, one was full of working stock [shoes and clothing actually for sale] and another basement floor that wasn’t particularly easy to access [partly due to its redundant nature], but was entirely dedicated to boxes of dead-stock.

Bringing things up to date, after a long hiatus of non-attendance, and discovering that the owners [‘Boss’ and his son, ‘Junior Boss’, no joke!] are now actively seeking a buyer for the business [a cool £1Million O.N.O.], I decided that this ‘Holy Grail’ type find was something that had to be documented and more importantly, shared with the world.