The Pub Table: Conserving an Ercol Pandora Table

Scandinavian Modern Co — Newsletter 06

I bought this Ercol Pandora table from a retiring publican. It had belonged to her parents, which put it at more than fifty years old.

I like the older Ercol pieces. They were made using British elm before Dutch elm disease transformed the English landscape and the timber supply on which the company had relied.

She mentioned that the table had been re-varnished at some point. Darker finishes were fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s, she said. Plausible enough.

It was only when I removed the later varnish from the top that I understood the more immediate reason.

Snowballs. Pints of Double Diamond. Fifty years of last orders.

Water and iron staining had turned the elm black in places—not rot, but the accumulated chemistry of an English pub. When the varnish came away, I was not looking simply at a worn surface. I was looking at accidental marquetry.

The re-varnishing had been less an act of preservation than concealment: the same impulse that covers a painting with darkened varnish and calls it protection.

I do not believe in erasing history from old furniture. The goal here was never a clean slate. Elm of this age does not have a clean slate; it has a face. What I wanted to remove was the pub, not the years.

For the darkest tannin staining, an oxalic-acid treatment offered a targeted approach. It works chemically on the discolouration rather than requiring the timber itself to be abraded away.

The alternative would have been sanding until the marks disappeared—which can mean sanding until the original surface disappears too. That is not conservation. It is destruction at a slower pace.

A spirit wipe allowed me to read the grain. One waxed corner provided a reminder of what the work was for.

Elm this age has something to say. You just have to listen.

Lightly conserved, not stripped. Anew but not new.