On an unassuming parade of shops towards Waterloo there is a hidden gem nestled between an Indian restaurant and a hairdressers with finds that are billions of years old.
The oldest piece in this shop is 3.5 billion years old.
It’s not every day that you get to hold a piece of the moon in your hand. But when I visited at London Fossils and Crystals, there was a piece of the solar system resting in my palm.
The piece of lunar meteorite is rare, you can only be in possession of moonrocks when they get caught up in the earth’s gravitational pull and finally come down to land. And, once it does fall, it has to go through a rigorous classification process.
Standing in the shop on Waterloo Road, the main drag towards the station if your coming via Elephant & Castle I was struck by the array of objects covering a multitude of shelves.
The place is simply bursting with stones harbouring various powers and ancient pieces of the past etched into stones that are billions of years old.
Owner Sheila Wood started with a small collection of items in 1999 and just happened to come across a supplier of fossils, who she still works with now.
She worked as a picture framer at the family shop with her husband Kevin Phillips, who now works at the shop with Sheila as well as their son Richie.
Soon, Sheila’s collection was outgrowing the framing shop and she looked for her own premises in 2013 and set up a home for London Fossils and Crystals.
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“The shop caters for collectors and also crystal healers, but they are totally different audiences,” says Sheila.
Kevin explains that the shop offers something for pretty much everyone, “ranging from someone looking for a cool gift, geological collectors and children with an encyclopaedic knowledge of geology to people who collect beautiful crystals or use them for wellbeing purposes”.
But Kevin’s favourite shoppers are those sourcing items for TV and film. London Fossils and Crystals buys have featured in Luther, Taboo, and a top-secret project coming out soon that they couldn’t say…
When it comes to personal collections, Sheila collects trilobites and Kevin meteorites.
She explains: “My trilobite collection started right from the beginning of business in 1999. I was looking for a logo, and I took a picture of this trilobite, and when I looked at the photo, he had a little smiley face and eyes. That was it. I was hooked.
“Every trilobite is a little character and individual, which was going about their life and then frozen in time.”
Kevin points to a trilobite placed on one of the many shelves in the shop and says it is 380 million years old. Some of his meteorites are between 4.3 and 4.6 billion years old, some even older than the planet, too.
But what’s the oldest item in the shop? That will be stromatolites, a fossilised algae aged 3.5 billion years.
Everything at London Fossils and Crystals has a story, and some come with myths and folklore attached to them, too.
Sheila says: “The folklore is very important. I say that to customers all around the world; keep your traditions, because otherwise, they’re going to die out, and that would be a shame.”
She gives the example of ammonites, which are known as snakestone. When they were found on the beaches, people said they were fossils of the snakes that St Hilda had rid from the Holy Island by turning them to stone.
There are other stories, too. Kevin explains how amethyst, the purple crystal, gets its name from when Bacchus sentenced a young girl to the tigers, but wanting to save her, goddess Diana turned her into pure Quartz.
Recognising his errors, remorseful Bacchus put his best wine into the crystal, which turned it purple. It is now largely believed that Amethyst prevents intoxication.
And people often come to the shop looking for crystals with certain powers. Sheila says they have seen crystals change people’s lives.
She adds: “Respect is the key. I always say that to people. You can’t ask what a crystal is going to do for you, there is no respect then for what nature has created.”
Nature produces crystals that are perfect cubes, or rhomboids, or quartz crystals that all have six sides.
Kevin adds: “These are all produced by the earth, there’s no interference in any way from man in making it do that. It fascinates us. We’re always learning.”
Learning is key when working with fossils and crystals, as well as qualifying sources. Sheila only works with trusted suppliers and goes to great lengths to ensure everything in the shop is top quality.
And you have to trust who you’re sourcing from. When it comes to meteorites, Kevin says you have to be careful “because there are too many meteor-wrongs”.
Sheila and Kevin also understand the power of crystals through what they see and hear from the community and customers, “word of mouth is a tradition”, says Kevin, who often has conversations with people who come to the shop about the stories behind purchases.
The pair add to the folklore of the items for sale by sharing these tales.
Whatever you may be seeking, London Fossils and Crystals could be the answer.
217 Waterloo Road, SE1 8XH
