When Ringo Starr popped into a shop in Birkenhead in 1963, little did he know that his visit would help change the future of what was to become a celebrated British brand.
The Beatles’ drummer had stopped off to buy a lava lamp, the brightly coloured interior piece that has hypnotised millions over the years with its slow-moving exchange of liquid and warmed wax inside a glass cylinder. After the Birkenhead shop announced its celebrity visit, sales of the lamp rocketed.
Then came lava lamp appearances on episodes of Doctor Who in the Patrick Troughton era and in the 1965 film Dr Who and the Daleks starring Peter Cushing. It also featured in the 1960s/70s TV hit The Prisoner, and soon its role as a cultural mainstay was established.
Now the brand is turning 60, and, against all the challenges of a changing audience, economic downturns, the rise of online shopping and Brexit, sales are still going strong.
To celebrate, Mathmos, the company behind the lamp, is launching a series of new designs throughout this month in collaboration with artists and designers and well-known names including the pop group Duran Duran and the celebrity photographer Rankin.
Rankin has a particular fondness for the brand as he shot a series of images of the lamps in the 1990s for his magazine Dazed & Confused, whose offices used to be on the same road as the Mathmos store. “Lava lamps are, to me, one of those things that shift in your consciousness,” he says. “If you grew up in the 80s like I did, they are just part of your memories, and it’s great that now they’ve come back into fashion again.”
For many of Rankin’s generation, the lamps are synonymous with student digs and late nights spent listening to Radiohead while staring at a lava lamp in someone’s bedroom. This was during a resurgence spurred by an Austin Powers-fuelled nostalgia trip, but most people probably associate them with the 1960s when they were invented.
Back then, they were associated with a hippy, psychedelic counterculture, and their popularity was given a boost not only by Starr but also Paul McCartney, who had lava lamps on stage with his band Wings, and David Bowie, who was photographed with one in his recording studio.
To still be going six decades later is not a bad position to be in for a British company, which continues to operate from a tiny factory in Poole, Dorset. Its current owner started selling the lamps on a market stall in Camden, London, in the late 1980s. “I came across a lava lamp box and it had a Poole [phone] number on it, which is coincidentally where I’m from,” says Cressida Granger, managing director of Mathmos. “I called them up, and I started buying the lamps from their tiny factory around the corner. At that time, they were churning out a few hundred a year.”
Granger started selling them on her stall of vintage products from the 60s and 70s, and what happened next she describes as “like a joke”. “I would put them out and they’d all sell instantly,” she says. Among the customers were some famous faces: the musician Marc Almond was a regular buyer. “All the other dealers wanted to know where I got them, so I had to burn the boxes so they wouldn’t find out.”
Granger went on to rent a shop in London with a fellow arts dealer, and that was when they decided to write to the inventor of the lamps to ask if they could buy the formula. The answer was no, but the pair were invited to meet the founder, the rather eccentric Edward Craven Walker.
Craven Walker, who among other things, made underwater naturist films, owned a nudist camp in the New Forest, and he asked them both to join him there. When they arrived he asked if they would be more comfortable without clothes (they declined and “hastily buttoned up their coats”, says Granger.)
A deal was struck, and Granger went on, over time, to buy the business from Craven Walker – including, of course, the “secret formula” for the liquid interior. This formula had come some way from its original, which Craven Walker worked hard to perfect, according to notes written later by his former wife, Christine.
He was originally inspired to invent the lamp after seeing it in a primitive form used as an egg-timer in the Queens Head pub in the New Forest. So basic was the manufacture of the original versions that Craven Walker used the bottle from a particular brand of orange squash, Tree Top, to make one of his early designs, the Astro Baby.
“When you make the lamps, you have to have a consistent wall thickness to make safe bottles, and bottling plants work on volume – like 50,000 a day – so it was hard to start off small,” says Granger.
Instead, Craven Walker bought up a load of bottles that were already made. “I think, in the beginning, they literally just used to tip the juice out and rinse them to get started on the lamps,” she adds.
Edward and Christine discovered they couldn’t trust delivery companies to take their lamps to retailers as they were easily damaged, so instead the couple bought an old Post Office van, which they called Smokey on account of its belching exhaust, and delivered their own products.
The lamps grew in popularity, and Craven Walker’s reputation soared. At one point he invited the cast of the controversial musical Hair to his home, and they accepted – further sealing the lamps’ reputation as a must-have item for those who saw themselves as part of a counterculture.
By the time Granger took over the brand in the late 1980s, it was on the wane. But she restyled and relaunched the lamps, shipping them abroad but retaining the manufacturing base in Poole.
“I wanted to reposition them,” says Granger. “I changed all the colours and the packaging, the marketing and even the names. I just wanted to make them more current really.”
The firm doubled in size for the next 10 years, she adds, and had something of a second heyday. The lamps appeared on the set of Channel 4’s The Word, Chris Evans’s TFI Friday and The Big Breakfast.
The internet age brought with it the inevitable problem of copycats, and there are now many imitations, with two factories in China churning out many of them. Collectors want both the originals and the copies, says Granger, and the challenge at Mathmos has been to continue to promote the history and quality of the original lamps.
The company only exports to Europe, and that is where 70% of its sales now come from, with a strong market in Germany, where the Mathmos brand is well known and the lamp associated much more with the 90s than the 60s. Across all markets, more than half the lamps bought now are by people who already own one.
“There is a big collectors’ community, and we still sell the original bulbs to fit the 1960s designs,” says Granger.
Brexit had a huge negative impact on the brand, with a new site needed in Europe to house stock that had previously been shipped to order. Paperwork and prices inevitably went up, but the brand survived.
Given all this, it’s astonishing looking around the factory in Poole that each bottle is still filled by a small but dedicated team of expert workers. New this year to the front of the factory is a showroom, displaying the whole Mathmos range. There, visitors (who must persevere if they want to find the hidden-away factory) can be dazed and amazed by an array of different designs, from the original Astro lamp to the 1.5m high floor-standing Saturn lamp.
From this week, Rankin’s eye-catching electric blue design will be featured among them, with original photography from him on each box.
“The lava lamp is such a simple idea but that is quite magical,” says Rankin. “And when you’re a photographer, the idea of light being magical is such an exciting thing. Just to be a small part of something that is ingrained in the fabric of British society and culture feels quite special.”
