Down The Pub: A Cockney Tale Of Old Storage Trunks

I still think about when the circus came to town once a year. Posters glued to walls promised elephants, fire breathers, acrobats — and always clowns. Looking at the trunk feels like it was there backstage, stuffed with costumes and props, storage trunk waiting for the show to begin.

Trunks aren’t just places to keep things. They’re keepers of journeys. Before cheap mass storage appeared, trunks were the way people travelled. Built solid, heavy duty, art station community sometimes decorated with brass corners or buy storage trunk painted lettering.

When I first stumbled across the circus clown trunk, I froze for a moment. The painted face staring upside down across the front felt like more than decoration. It felt like a fragment of a lost world — a travelling circus.