We speak to a lot of collectors here at Boxman. One thing we’ve noticed is that often there’s an infectious enthusiasm in the way they speak of their treasury – whatever might be in it.

Following on from our compilation of record-breaking collections recently, we’ve come to the realisation that most of us are collectors to varying degrees. Even if you’re not dedicating entire rooms to your haul, there are often little pockets of curation in your home, whether it’s the three mid-century teapots you found on a Saturday morning potter around a market, a bowl of pieces of sea glass on a shelf or part of a windowsill given over to books entirely about Bobby Charlton.

The question we’ve been pondering is… why? Why do we have – to a greater or lesser degree – this need to collect stuff?

“Most collectors enjoy an odd relationship with their hoards, blending an intense personal pride and sense of achievement with an apologetic air whenever it is mentioned, like you are collecting something deeply disturbing like the hair of dolls or your old toenail clippings.” - Daniel Storey, writing for 365 Football

The psychologist Christian Jarrett, writing in The Guardian outlined five theories that psychologists have proffered to explain our need to accumulate things, summarized as:

1. People learn to seek comfort in accumulating belongings, particularly if they’ve felt unloved as a child.
2. Collecting may be motivated by an existential anxiety and the belief that the collection will outlive our mortal lives (that’s another jolly cheerful thought, eh?)
3. Evolutionary theorists have suggested that a collection might be a way for males to demonstrate their ability to accumulate resources (and ‘evolutionary’ surely must be the salient point here: we’re not sure that a demonstration of a truly enormous collection of stamps would be enough to convince Love Island contestants, for example).
4. Endowment theory: an unfortunate notion to proffer following a passing mention of Love Island. In fact it merely means that we tend to value things more once we own them. It’s an interesting theory, but we’re not quite sure if something being valued more post-ownership explains why you might own it in the first place…
5. Contagion theory might explain why people obsess after celebrity-related artifacts: it’s the idea that things are somehow infused with a little of ‘the essence of the person who owned them’. Sounds a bit creepy, no?

Whether or not you associate with any of these explanations, there’s something undeniably human about finding, categorizing, arranging and rearranging (unless you’re a magpie, in which case there’s something undeniably birdish about it, too).

Sometimes there’s a reason for amassing a collection that’s personal and poignant - and it doesn’t have to do with personal trauma. Jack, who we spoke to on these pages last year, has a small collection of crystal glasses made by a family member at Watford Crystal, a decorative glassware company that is no longer in business. After one such item chipped he set out to find a replacement and in doing so became fascinated by the process of the search and the educational aspect of having to research a little more about the company along the way. That collection, he told us, will never be expansive, but it’s very meaningful nonetheless.

“I think there’s an innate human instinct to [collect]. It comes down to that hunter-gatherer mentality of going out, finding something and bringing it back. We have this deep-seated, ingrained need to learn and, in collecting things, we enable ourselves to do that very tangibly and visibly. It’s immediately rewarding in so many ways.” - Mark Hill, antiques expert speaking to SideStory

Just as we have an instinctual drive to organise our homes (however that may manifest itself), so too do we seem to have an inbuilt tendency to collect things within them. There’s a tendency to ascribe a kind of geekish behaviour to this (and let’s face it: when the items being collected are a little idiosyncratic, it’s easy to see why), but – to paraphrase Dr Seuss – a collection’s a collection, no matter how small. There will always be completists who seek to have the entire run/ collection/ back-catalogue/ editions, but so too are there those of us who are content with a quietly curated collection of items.

There’s really no need to feel bashful about your collection: we all have them. Isn’t that reassuring?

How about you? Are you a small-scale or large scale collector? We’d love to see what your collections look like! Find us on Instagram and join in the discussion with the hashtag #londoncollectors.

And, as ever, if you need somewhere to put your collectibles (or, maybe to put the things to make room for said collectibles) Boxman can help. We’ll deliver our sturdy boxes straight to your door, leave you to pack them up as you see fit and then we’ll be back to whisk them away when you’re ready. You can log the contents of your boxes online, making it easy to see at the click of a button which item’s in which box, should you suddenly realise you need something back. Questions? Give us a shout! We like to chat.