The Merry Month by Robert Merry : Remembering Pisani
Robert Merry is an independent stone consultant and project manager who ran his own company for 17 years. He also acts as an expert witness.
The demise of Pisani PLC and its exit from London is very much the end of an era… so many happy memories.
When I first started in the industry in 1989 Pisani had a depot under the railway arches in London’s Shepherds Bush.
It was notoriously gloomy with little room for viewing slabs and a Portacabin for an office. It was run by a gruff, older man whose name defeats me, although I remember he smoked roll-ups incessantly. Sadly, he died a few months after retiring.
The one shining light in the otherwise subterranean experience of selecting and loading slabs from Pisani then was an Irishman called Pat.
Pat was the slab shifter. Always welcoming and positive, even if what you had reserved by phone the day before had been sold to someone else – as it frequently had been in those days.
When Pisani finally closed the Shepherds Bush branch and moved up the A4 to Transport Avenue on the river Brent, I was pleased to see Pat moved with them.
I also met Brian and Simon Chitty, Chris Kelsey, Jamie from South America, Nick Telfer and so many others.
Arrive in the yard, park the van, go to reception, discuss what you want, wait for a salesman to walk you up the yard.
It was the first time I’d seen a gantry crane in operation in the UK. It was the first time I’d selected slabs with a client in a snow storm.
Then came a brief expansion, to a Bardon’s depot, out the back of Charlton. A huge area of land with a few hundred slabs in the middle. Peter Kingham ran that for a while. Miserable place.
Then Pisani expanded into Woolwich, with a depot in Warspite Road, close to the Thames Barrier. Jamie, now from Sarf America, was in charge of sales. Mainly outside, tucked against a river wall in a pretty miserable part of Sarf East London. Cold, even on a hot day. But Pat was still there as the slab shifter. I never found out much about him. Conversation wasn’t his strength. But it was good to know he was there. Pisani looked after their own.
It was about this time I stopped fabricating and didn’t really visit marble yards very much after that. I know they closed Woolwich and Transport Avenue and moved the whole London operation to Feltham.
When I eventually visited Feltham I was not too impressed with the customer service. And there was no Pat. He had shifted his last slab, I guess. Jamie from South America had retired, too. I remember he had two sons, who played rugby, as did Jamie in an earlier life, he once told me.
The showrooms at Feltham were impressive, but it was a long way from central London. I did meet Costas, the owner, at his office there briefly. A nice man. He received a lot of phone calls while I was having a conversation with him, I remember. Business is business, I guess.
Of course, direct trading with mainland European stone suppliers has become easier these days. The internet, the ease of travel, transport arrangements – they all make direct buying of slabs or cut-to-size simpler. Local demand has probably shrunk and Pisani were caught expanding to Feltham when the financial crisis struck in 2008.
But there are still some excellent local stone wholesalers who have weathered all the financial storms and the revolution in buying trends, so they are still here today – Cullifords, MGLW, Marble & Granite Centre in the London area, Thomas Group in Manchester, to name a few. The London ones have all had their share of ex-Pisani employees working for them over the years.
While Pisani moved around London from depot to depot, spending money on expansion and contraction, the others mostly stood still. Familiar, local and accessible.
The loss of Pisani as a slab wholesaler in London is sad. But I have some good memories of the people who contributed to its success. I am still in contact with a few of them today. But in my older world, it’s the end of an era indeed.