The South London lock up home to one of the world's best cultural archives

As James Hyman pulls up the metal shutter to his archive one morning in May, the scale of his treasure trove immediately becomes clear — as does his apprehension at revisiting it.

Blue plastic crates stuffed with magazines are stacked so tightly in the 250sq ft lock-up that they block out most of the light from above. “I think they could have fitted another one in there,” Hyman, 55, says, pointing at a space barely wide enough to fit a box of breakfast cereal. It’s not clear if he’s joking.

This is just one of four storage spaces he has been leasing in the same building since September 2023 for an annual sum that would eclipse many Londoners’ rent. Behind a few padlocks, the Hyman Archive — a mindbogglingly expansive collection of some of the world’s best cultural writing – lies in a strange limbo.

It’s one of the country’s greatest repositories of information. And it sits, under lock and key, next to a bus depot in south London.

For as long as he can remember, Hyman has been a collector. For him, collecting is not hoarding, but an act of curation, care and memory.

Growing up in 1970s and 1980s Primrose Hill, his life was shaped by the magazines and comics he bought. Trips to the cinema would happen just a few times a year, and radio and TV gave a small glimpse into the world outside — but magazines and comics opened up the whole universe. One of his first memories is from 1976, of crying after one of his favourite characters disappeared when the comics Monster Fun and Buster merged.

As his collection grew and grew and his childhood bedroom started to fill with crates, cracks began to appear in the ceiling below, but his parents never uttered a word of complaint. Later in life, not everyone was as forgiving: “I had grief from a best friend who I shared a flat with near Baker Street,” Hyman says. “And he was like: ‘Dude, you're ruining the infrastructure of my house.’.” The stacks of crates would tower over his bed and, lying there in the dark, Hyman would picture tall men in black looming above him.

If any publication acted as a cornerstone of the early collection, it was Smash Hits, the magazine that ran from 1978 to 2006. Its fusion of pop culture and mischief (questions put to celebrities included “Does your mum play golf?” and “Did you pass your cycling proficiency test?”) were a gateway to Hyman working at MTV, where the collection morphed into an archive.

As a scriptwriter for presenters in the early days of the channel, he would incorporate facts he had learned from a random magazine he had recently read, and inevitably stored somewhere. “A presenter would pop up and say, ‘Coming up now is a new video by Madonna, and let me just tell you now that Madonna said in a recent Rolling Stone interview that she hates Sean Penn.’ You had to constantly have good nuggets of information because those songs were played repeatedly. You didn't have Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook, you just had magazine content.”

Colleagues at MTV realised the benefit of having an unofficial pop culture registrar on staff and would ask him to do research for them, too. And the more useful the archive became, the bigger it got, as Hyman acquired magazines from any source possible. Nothing was too niche: he obtained everything from a rare cover of The Face featuring Eminem wearing a pink T-shirt (the distribution of which was reportedly blocked by the rapper’s disapproving agent) to Hair to Stay, the magazine for men who like their women on the hirsute side.

As the archive grew past a world record 51,000 issues (Hyman now estimates the figure to be more than 150,000), it came to be valued by journalists, lawyers, students, curious members of the public and magazine staff whose employers had not kept back issues of their own publications. It allowed one interviewer to challenge David Bowie on why he gave a Nazi salute at Victoria train station in the 1970s, a detail buried in a long-forgotten article uncovered by Hyman. And it led to a crass comment by Paul McCartney about Brigitte Bardot in an old interview being resurrected, much to his embarrassment.

The archive’s home has moved over the years, from a small unit in Islington to the vast storage space of the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. But, after eight years there, Hyman and his team were forced to pack it all up over several months and move it a few miles south — another victim of London’s rent increases.

Beetlemania: the crack team responding to London’s insect invasion

In the depths of a London institution you’ll find 27,000 boxes, nine million beetles and a race against time

The LondonerMiles Ellingham

And so, for the past two years, it has sat here, untouched until today, inside more than a thousand crates. Its potential as a research tool is enormous, but so is the challenge of managing it. For now, its usefulness is also locked up.

Hyman’s love for his collection is evident as he scans the boxes and his memories of what is inside. But I ask if he has ever felt it was too much for him to keep on top of, and he doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Yeah, I'd say now.”

Occasionally, mid-conversation, Hyman will stop. A detail will niggle at him, and he will need to answer it, otherwise the conversation can’t continue. You can almost picture him walking through the corridors of the archive inside his own mind, pulling a box down from a shelf and uncovering the article that finally brings him his answer.

This is never more so than when he’s talking about something in the Hyman Archive that he half remembers. And in these moments, it’s clear: Hyman is the key to accessing everything inside his collection. He and it are bound together and, without his knowledge, it risks just being a lot of paper inside a lot of boxes.

Hyman would very much like this not to be the case, and his hope is to get the entire thing digitised and made searchable, so that other people can access that knowledge too. The process of doing so has already started, with every old copy of his beloved The Face magazine placed online in a landmark deal with the publisher. He knows that only in uploading the entire archive can its full potential be realised.

The crossroads at which Hyman finds himself is not unusual. You might call it the collector’s burden: as a collection grows, the responsibility of maintaining it, finding a purpose for it and, crucially, knowing when to stop becomes all-consuming.

When Sir Thomas Phillipps died in 1872, he left behind the world’s largest collection of books and manuscripts, having once written to a friend (in block capitals, apparently in all seriousness): “I wish to have one copy of every book in the world!!!” One visitor to his home complained it looked “more miserable and dilapidated every time I visit it, and there is not a room now that is not crowded with large boxes full of [manuscripts].”

It’s a burden that was understood by Edda Tasiemka, too. Born in Germany in 1922, she moved with her husband Hans to London in 1949. Hans, a former left-wing journalist, had a habit of keeping cuttings of newspaper articles in his pockets, and, before too long, the two had built up their own archive that filled every space of their three-storey house in Temple Fortune, Barnet.

Their files — on subjects as varied as the Yugoslav royal family, central heating and the Yorkshire Ripper — became an invaluable resource for journalists and researchers, and after Hans’ death in 1979, it was maintained by Edda, who joked that dead people were stored in her garage, religion was in her bathroom and that she slept with footballers. 

Edda and Hyman, collectors in kind, became close friends, and when she died in 2019, aged 96, he inherited her six million cuttings. They now sit alongside his crates of magazines, stored in fading boxes and loose files that give off a musty scent inside the starkly lit lock-up.

Hyman speaks of Edda with affection, but in doing so, he acknowledges that she may have let her archive get the better of her. As he reflects on visiting her home, he pauses: “Talk about overwhelming. I think she was tottering into hoarding. But she had an intent, she had a purpose, she had a mission: it was information for people.”

It’s the same mission Hyman feels, but that burden of responsibility has only increased now he is also the custodian of Edda and Hans’ life’s work. There’s a world in which all his magazines, and all Edda’s cuttings, are put on display in a new museum, one that tells the story of the past century through its pop culture. There’s a purpose in there somewhere, and Hyman is never more energised than when he speaks of his vision for its future.

Hyman puts the padlocks back in place and admits that revisiting the archive-in-limbo feels better than he expected. His sense of dread at being overwhelmed has been punctured.

We board the train back to London Bridge and, looking out of the window, he sees a shape in the clouds. He searches his own mental archive for the right term again — learned, naturally, from an old magazine, in this case the Fortean Times. “Pareidolia,” he eventually says: the phenomenon where we recognise shapes in things.

It was pareidolia that was at play when Hyman pictured those crates of magazines as men in black looming over his bed. The archive could just as easily be perceived as a burden or a blessing, a maze or a map. It just depends on how you choose to look at it.