16 ★ FTWeekend 17 August/18 August 2019

Out

of time

I

t wasn’t until I’d spent a few years

in London that I started to notice

the pianos. There were the pianos

in the stations — King’s Cross, Tot-

tenham Court Road, Lewisham,

the underpass by Herne Hill. There was

the piano that I sometimes overheard

on the way to the bus stop. There were

the pianos in the pubs. One had a sign

on the lid, laminated to protect it from

spilt drinks, that simply said: “Please

do not play the piano.”

This was a city that seemed to have

more pianos than it needed. As a medio-

cre pianist with a repertoire vanishing

by the year (I’m now down to the first

half of Chopin’s “Nocturne in C Sharp

Minor”, the second half of Coldplay’s

“The Scientist” and a blues arrange-

ment of “Over the Rainbow”), I thought

it might be worth buying one before I’d

forgotten how to play anything at all.

When I went on the internet to assess

the options, I was met with an unex-

pected sight: waves of pianos, second-

hand, priced at £0. The condition was

only that you took them away. Some-

times, the Gumtree ads hinted at the rea-

sons. One said it was because the owner

lived in a flat, which was ominous, given

that I also lived in a flat. Most of them

were in need of tuning or repairs.

This great coastal shelf of pianos, I

later discovered, could be traced to the

north London factories a century ear-

lier, part of a vast industry as integral to

the city’s identity as gin or shipping

insurance. The instruments they pro-

duced were at the fulcrum of social life;

when you got married, you bought a bed

and you bought a piano.

In an age of screens and electricity,

there were clearly hard questions to be

asked of these wooden machines, their

underlying technology little changed

since the reign of Queen Victoria. The

next time I was in a pub, I spoke to the

bartender about the ignored piano in

the corner. It had been cheaper than Sky

Sports, he said. But then they’d decided

to get Sky Sports anyway.

Pianos had gone from cutting-edge

entertainment services to antique, in

three generations. Not a single piano

factory remains in London. But what

had become of the tuners and restorers,

the dealers and shops, the elderly neigh-

bour who can hold a tune?

Beyond their decline, pianos also

seemed to hold some clues about the

changing nature of modern life. Once

they sanctified the very concept of

home; today they’re ill-suited to an

environment of declining urban space

and transient, depersonalised living.

And, almost as though someone saw all

this coming, they’re heavy. They’re so

heavy that you have to bring in special-

ists to get them out of the building.

“The houses of London are full of

these old pianos that no one can quite

be bothered to sort out until they’re

forced to,” says Stephen Willett, the

owner of a piano removals company.

“They’re waiting for fate.”

As a young man in the 1960s, Bill

Kibby-Johnson learnt how to tune

pianos. As the decades wore on, going

from home to home, he would occasion-

ally get offered one for free.

They were being given away for one

simple reason: their value was less than

the cost of repair. This was partly

because of their age and partly because

of the devastating impact of central

heating. Kibby-Johnson guesses that, by

now, the average instrument in the aver-

age front room is probably Edwardian.

These piano offerings, he says, were “a

piece of history that was going to get

burnt”. So, to save them from the funeral

pyre, he began taking them in, and the

collection soon outgrew his home in Suf-

folk. At one point, the cottage hosted

three pianos and a harmonium. Last

year, he moved to a farmhouse in the

Lincolnshire countryside.

It was a bright summer’s day when I

visited but you wouldn’t know it from

inside the barn, which is filled with

approximately 50 pianos. The collection

begins in the 18th century. As with the

best history books, the transitions creep

up on you; around halfway through, the

pianos stop having candleholders. None

look properly playable without exten-

sive restoration work. One is sprouting

what looks like a nest. Some have

cracked keys, which makes them look

even more like teeth than you suddenly

realise they always did.

Kibby-Johnson is trying to piece

together a museum, but it’s a difficult

task. He’s hoping to raise funding for a

better building. The walls are decorated

with old adverts and notices. One in par-

ticular caught my eye: a sign about an

organisation called Great Yarmouth

Paranormal Investigations, which

visited in 2012 and found evidence of

“residual” presences attached to some

of the instruments.

In the UK, the fall in piano sales is well

documented. About 5,000 are sold

annually, according to data from the

Music Industries Association, com-

pared with 30,000 in the 1980s. Less

well known is the impact this has had on

the trades those sales sustained.

When Kibby-Johnson trained as a

tuner in the 1960s, he could see himself

making quite a good living, but recently,

he’d struggled to find enough instru-

ments to tune. He studied at the London

College of Furniture, on a course that no

longer exists.

Few of the courses still exist. The

Royal National College for the Blind, in

Hereford, no longer offers training in

piano tuning — a skill that once

employed men who lost their sight in the

trenches of the first world war. The same

pattern held in the restoration trades

that keep old pianos alive. One piano

restorer I spoke to, Lucy Coad, said she

couldn’t find any trained young people

to work with. It wasn’t just pianos either

— the welder she’d worked with on a

recent job had the same problem.

The trade of actually making pianos,

meanwhile, had almost died out in the

UK, before coming back to life. Adam

Cox launched Cavendish Pianos after

the Yamaha-owned Kemble, Britain’s

only surviving piano maker, moved pro-

duction to east Asia in 2009. He employs

young workers who have studied at

Newark College, one of the last bastions

of technical piano education in the UK.

In the middle of his workshop, there’s

an opened-up piano. Even though I’ve

played the instrument for over two dec-

ades, it’s the first time I’ve grasped how

they really work. There’s an iron frame,

and felt-tipped hammers strike the

strings. But the music is in the sound-

ing in the Daily Mail,” says McIlroy. “The

phone was off the hook for weeks”.

We wander around, looking at differ-

ent models: Steinways, Blüthners, the

odd Yamaha. We pause by a Wilhelm

Steinberg, a historic German make. But,

in some kind of metaphor for globalisa-

tion, it turns out the piano was actually

built in China, where a company now

owns the brand. In 2014, 382,000

pianos were made in the country, equal

to 80 per cent of total global production,

according to Daxue Consulting. A grow-

ing proportion of homes in China’s cities

now host a piano.

It used to be the factories and shops of

London that sent pianos across the

world. The day I visited Markson

Pianos, near Regent’s Park, the sign on

the front was being replaced for the first

time since 1962. Back then, the business

used to ship pianos to the Bahamas.

It still sells about 500 pianos a year.

Simon Markson, one of two cousins

running the business, says there have

been quiet periods. On occasion, he’s

walked “the length and breadth of Lon-

don” to drum up business. There are

only a handful of competitors in the city

now. Julian Markson, Simon’scousin,

recalls when a director at Baldwin, a US

piano company, came to London in the

1970s. “He said, I looked at the Yellow

Pages — you have more piano retailers in

London than in the entire state of New

York, you can’t survive”. In 1983, Bald-

win’s holding company went bankrupt.

Beyond the high street, the city has

changed in perhaps even deeper ways.

With all the property conversions that

are going on nowadays, Julian says, it’s

hard to get pianos into a room. Stair-

cases, no longer as big as they used to be,

don’t have the “turn”. You have to send

it through the first-floor window in a

crane, which might cost as much as the

piano. As with central heating, it was as

though the modern home were conspir-

ing against the piano.

Markson Pianos also sells digital

pianos — no crane required. In the UK,

sales of these have risen to 25,000 a year.

Once you add together acoustic and

digital piano sales, the figures haven’t

changed that much. People obviously

still play; digital pianos that begin to

replicate the touch of an actual piano

start at about £400. One obvious differ-

ence, as per the iPhone, is that software

quickly becomes redundant. The piano,

by contrast, is basically the same

machine it was in the 19th century.

New technology, though, is blending

with old. Silent pianos, ideal for the

modern city, combine digital elements

with real acoustics. You can play them

with headphones on, in complete pri-

vacy. Markson’s also had a Disklavier in

its workshop: a kind of Yamaha grand

that can, in effect, play itself.

If you didn’t know what was going on

beneath the lid, you might mistake the

description for that of pianolas,

invented more than a century earlier.

There had been one in the corner of

Kibby-Johnson’s barn. He’d demon-

strated how it worked, pressing the ped-

als with his feet, and told me that on

other models, the keys move down of

their own accord as the music plays.

Kibby-Johnson had been worried

about pianos getting burnt. But they

often met a very different end. In the

1950s and 1960s, a strange phenomenon

swept England. Groups of men wielding

sledgehammers would compete to

smash pianos to pieces, which had to be

small enough to pass through a letter-

box. There used to be a Guinness World

Record for piano smashing. There’s even

a video on YouTube. But the comment-

ers below are soupset by the scene that

an acknowledgment was published, and

the record was subsequently retired.

It is temptingto read many things into

that phenomenon — theiconoclasm of

the postwar years; a mourning of old

technologies as new ones overwhelm

us. When I asked people who witnessed

the contests, though, it was simpler.

Old pianos werea nuisance back

then, like old televisions might be today.

The piano isn’t dead. It’s just that

many of them aren’t quite alive. The

trades that tune them, restore them,

even value and sell them, are waning.

And the real proof of their decline is the

nostalgia. In London, that’s one reason

they end up instations. It might also be

because they don’t fit in the flats carved

from the city’s terraced houses, which is

why I never ended up buying one, even

for a price of nothing.

It is in the home, after all, that the fate

of the piano is written. Towards the end

of our conversation, Simon Markson had

described a recent visit to anorth Lon-

don house. The piano was a good Ger-

man make, and had been in the family so

long that it seemed worth restoring. But

there were complications. The pedal had

hardly any metal left, and theowner

didn’t want it to be replaced, because it

was part of the instrument’s history.

There was a cigarette burn, but she

didn’t want that removed. That was

Uncle Ted’s, she said, he always put his

cigarette there. And in the end, after

they’d weighed it up, they decided that

they wouldn’t restore the piano. They’d

just leave it as it was.

Thomas Hale is a reporter for FT Alphaville

Big, loud and very heavy, the piano looks ever more ill-suited to modern

lifestyles. Can it retain a place in the British home?Thomas Halereports

Pianos were at the fulcrum

of social life; when you got

married, you bought a bed

and you bought a piano

Above and below:

used pianos being

checked prior to

auction at Conway

Hall in Holborn,

London,

photographed for

the FT by Harry

Mitchell

board — a thin layer of wood cut from

trees that grow slowly at great altitude,

often in the Alps or Tibet.

Cavendish has so far made and sold

179 instruments. The classic model

costs £4,995. When I ask Cox what he

thinks of the free pianos on the internet,

he says that if there were no scrap value

for cars, there would be millions of cars

going for £0. It’s an interesting compari-

son. Cavendish is based in a building

that was once a blacksmith’s forge. On

the workshop wall, there’s a decorated

map of the old piano factories of Cam-

den, but the place feels like a refuge

from the city. You couldn’t do this there.

What you can do, though, is hold an

auction. Four times a year, Conway Hall

in Holborn is filled with second-hand

pianos — they’re jammed in, as though

they’re making up the audience.

Piano Auctions describes itself as the

world’s leading piano auctioneer. It is

also the world’s only specialist piano auc-

tioneer. “You’ve got to ask yourself why,”

says Séan McIlroy, a sharply dressed

former antiques professional who runs

the business alongside Richard Reason.

Not all of the old, unused pianos of

England end up on Gumtree. Some

might end up here. They ultimately

come from what both McIlroy and Rea-

son, independently, and on several

occasions, refer to as the four Ds. The

day before the June auction, McIlroy

confidently expects to sell 98 per cent of

the pianos: “Our downsizers don’t want

them back, our dead people don’t want

them back, our divorced people don’t

want them back, and our people in debt

don’t want them back.”

The business advertises for people to

sell, as well as buy, pianos. Most of the

calls they get are for pianos they don’t

want, because they aren’t worth any-

thing. So, they target high-value read-

ers, like those of the Times or Telegraph.

“We once made the mistake of advertis-

Flat conversions make it

harder to get pianos into a

room. Staircases, no longer

as big, don’t have the ‘turn’

A Victorian family with piano— Getty

                 

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