Skip Hire Blog

What a week! Not only have we moved offices, but I also got the chance to name check Topskips.com Skip Hire services on BBC Radio 2's Chris Evans Show on Tuesday after being invited on to talk about our trade industry magazine, The Skip, as it's (admittedly) an obscure publication. I really enjoyed being interviewed by Chris as he's one very clever and funny guy. I hope you enjoy this too:

Our founder and Managing Director, Mark Attwood, has been unveiled as one of the Crain’s “40 Under 40” Class of 2008 - an annual list of 40 people who have achieved success in business before turning 40.

Mark said: “It’s a great honour for everyone involved with TopSkips to be recognized in this way. The award is as much for my partners Katy Attwood and Kenny Goodman, and our fantastic team, including Louise Malpas and Steve Wild, as it is for me – especially as most of them will be at the dinner to collect it as we’ll be on holiday!”

“We’re very proud of what we’ve achieved in skip hire over the past five years, and really excited about what we’re going to achieve in skip hire, total waste management, container hire, toilet hire, plant hire and many other projects not yet released to the public in the future!”

For further details on this honour, go to: http://www.crainsmanchesterbusiness.co.uk/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=40

A message for Topskips valued business clients:

Don't get caught in a jam this bank holiday - we are already taking orders for next week.

Order your skip hire, container hire, toilet hire, and other site hire services before Friday to guarantee next week deliveries.

Call your Account Management team on: 0161 475 3963

You may already know that Topskips are the only skip hire company in the UK to sponsor a junior basketball team. Well, not content with sponsoring St Paul’s Slammers of Withington, (the Greater Manchester Schools Junior Basketball Champions 2007), Topskips have now moved up an age-group to sponsor… ‘The Warriors’ – also of Withington. Whilst the ‘Slammers’ continue to flourish in the Saturday Morning Primary School League, the Warriors are a team of Year 7 (first year secondary school kids), some of whom were part of the Slammers team who won a string of gold and sliver medals over the past four years.

The Warriors play on Friday night at the John Amaechi Basketball Centre, Whalley Range, in the Year 7&8 League – and although the team comprises of only Year 7’s, they have already punched above their weight by finishing second in the Division 2 Winter League and gaining immediate promotion to Division One. The only downside with that is that, until the Summer, they will find themselves up against teams largely made up of Year 8’s, some of whom are a foot taller than the Warriors! So this is proving the players’ most challenging season since they began playing together as young juniors.

RECENT RESULTS

WARRIORS 36 – PARRS WOOD HEAT 30

In a tough encounter with the Heat who are seasoned competitors in Div One, the Warriors took an early lead and battled hard to keep their noses in front the whole way. Excellent win against more experienced opponents.

TORNADOES 56 – WARRIORS 28

The height of the Tornadoes who might have more been aptly named the ‘Skyscrapers’ always meant they would have the advantage against the Div 1 rookies but the Warriors showed customary grit and did well to put so many baskets past the Tornadoes’ tall defence.

‘SLAMMERS’ (Not St Pauls!) 58 – WARRIORS 36

No, not our Slammers! This Y7/8 outfit seems to have borrowed our young team’s name – and some of their basketball prowess by the look of it. Despite that, the Warriors might have got a lot closer but for some wastefulness in front of the basket. However, once again, it was good to see the Division 1 new boys competing with much larger opponents.

‘I can’t overstate the generosity of Topskips in sponsoring the kits of both our teams. It has made such a difference to the players being well turned-out and wearing kits they like playing in. In Summer 2007, the Slammers played in a series of three tournaments, firstly, the South Manchester Schools Schools Basketball Tournament, then the Manchester Championship and finally the Greater Manchester Tournament (mentioned above)’. They won all three. It was fantastic to take the team to these tournaments, turned out in such a good kit and that wouldn’t have been possible with the help and support of Topskips. Without doubt this contributed to our great success.’ JAMES QUINN, CURRENT COACH OF ‘THE WARRIORS & COACH OF ‘ST PAULS SLAMMERS’ 2003-7.

Okay, this is the weirdest blog entry I've ever made. What follows is the increasingly bizarre/funny exchanges (depends on your point of view) between Louise and Katy of TopSkips and a TopSkips customer. You have been warned...

Sent: 28 April 2008 23:47
To: Louise Malpas
Subject: history of skips

I've been puzzling about skips. I was overseas in 1980-85, when I came back, I noticed skips, thought... What a good idea, great design, the stacking/nesting, the lifting/tipping mechanism, a masterly bit of minimal design, so good that most people never give it a thought. Who, I wondered, Who designed it, and when? And who pioneered it in Britain?

Yet I can't find the answer on the internet!

What I did find was your website. Do you know the answer? Will you tell me?

I was told.... There's a house on Tong Road in Leeds, surrounded by derelict trucks and tractors.... I was told the man who lived there had made his fortune by inventing the skip and skiploader. But no hard facts.

I like the blog, it's given me a few smiles. I use skips a lot, have chucked a load of things in that other people might use, I've also found stuff I wanted in skips. Can't pass one without a peek.

Tomorrow I'll be chucking concrete blocks and a few doors into one.

Cheers!

2008/4/29 Louise Malpas:

Hello there

Thanks for your email. I have attached a PDF of the historyof skips. Hope it is informative. It was written by my sister Katy (we set up Topskips together with her husband a few years ago) - she is as enthusiastic as skips as you seem to sound!

You may also want to check out the website of the trade magazine that we publish -www.theskip.net

Kind regards

From: ersatz soubriquet
Sent: 30 April 2008 00:08
To: Louise Malpas
Subject: Re: history of skips

Thanks for the very prompt reply. I'd already read the history pdf, via theskip.net. Whilst it's interesting on the word, I'm still no wiser as to the origins of the steel things.
I'm very familiar with skeps, having grown up in Yorkshire, with a father in the weaving industry. All the mills had their deliveries of yarn in skeps, rectangular wicker baskets, about four feet long by 3 wide by three high. Each was equipped with buffalo hide hinges for the lid, leather closure straps, and usually a big cast-iron numbered plaque with the owners name.
The firm that made them, the name escapes me... but they were in Flushdyke, Ossett. And when the skep market disappeared almost overnight in the early eighties, the same workers found new customers for furniture, and big baskets for the sport of hot air ballooning.
Skip, Skepp, I suspect the origin is in old norse, skepp, skibh, skiff, a ship. some boats of early times were of woven construction, covered in hide, and our wicker skeps may well be mutant descendants of the corracle.
yes, I also recall the tipping trucks called skips that came out of the collieries, their ancestry is closer to the big tin things.
I'm not, by the way, particularly a skip enthusiast, though I'm sure they exist, I know people who can tell you more than you ever wanted to know about postboxes, i've heard of people who take brass-rubbings of sewer lids...
No, I'm just a bloke who's curious as to where they came from, and when.
And nobody seems to know. And I can't remember them before 1985, nor find evidence of them.
So. I worked overseas... when I came back, no street was complete without a skip. Or were they always there and I'd failed to notice?

2008/4/30 Katy Attwood:

Dear Mr Soubriquet

I like the contrast between your Teutonic first name and your Gaulish surname. It reminds me of my English teacher who in my sixth form report made mention of the 'debonair schadenfreude' that characterized my essays (I also did French and German A-level so this was his idea of a joke).

Anyway, I think you'll find that attached just the thing you are looking for (specifically pages 10 – 12). You mustn't think that we are in the skip game and publishers of Britain's only trade magazine exclusively for the skip industry without having the curiosity to discover the obscure origins of skip hire in Britain. History is important – if you don't know where you came from, you don't know who you are. Though your obvious commitment to etymology leads me to think you already appreciate this.

So as you will see, skip hire starts with our old friends – the Krauts. They are still the world leaders in the recycling industry and the biggest and best machines are of German manufacture.

If you need any further information, please get in touch. It is nice to see people with a healthy interest in this most beleaguered of industries.

Regards

Katy Attwood

Why, thank you, Skip-Sisters..
I've amassed a few names over the years. Ersatz Soubriquet came into being as a character who poked fun at very serious arty folk by sending in spoof reviews and articles to an international ceramic art magazine. Later on, he wrote for landrover club magazines..the internet unleashed him to poke sticks into other people's spokes. He is so firmly tongue-in-cheek that people think he's an international gobstopper-tester.
Slightly more serious, the alchemist and, it is rumoured, the bloke who really designed Da Vinci's machines, is Bogus Cognomen , somehow stranded here beyond his time, after the baekelite knob on his Atkinson-ThrippThrimbobulator broke.
They are sharing space in my head with the daredevil LambruscoFettucini, who tested the edible tyre.
(* The Edible Tyre, a Soubriquet invention aimed to solve the problem of old tyres in landfill. Prototyped in Pontefract, tested, by Dunlop, in Doncaster, these tyres were made using a new liquorice vulcanising process, The Basset/Jaguar special set a new lap record on these tyres at Le Mans, and performed faultlessly at speed. If it hadn't been for the unfortunate escape from a French genetics lab of a batch of unusually voracious racing slugs, (which had been bred to detect cross-border liquorice smugglers), Bertie Basset might have been with us now, or, at least, have survived the race.)

I think Debonair Schadenfreude might be a mysterious, elegant female villain, of the type so prevalent in James Bond films. I see her now, sixties retro-chic, raising one eyebrow to summon the ever attentive barman, ah! look, her ear-rings are flashing as she takes an incoming signal from her hovercopter, which is right now skimming the waves toward the secret island.

Okay, I'm a bit wiser now, re: Skips of the sixties. Now I'll have to chase up the references of Berndt Schadenfreude, in Bad-Skippenvagen, who prototyped his first skip in 1957 when he came across a scrapyard full of half finished Panzer tanks. Taking the turrets off the tank, and cutting out the top deck enabled him to scoop out all the innards, leaving a trackless tank with the ability to be stacked. "But what GOOD is it to anyone?" cried his long suffering mistress, Hannelore, as she chucked several old office chairs, two doors, and a bag of old limpet-mines into the handy steel tub................"Wait, Mum!," cried their little daughter, Debonaire "Can we throw my old cot in there too?".
Soon it was a business. As young Debonaire grew, she loved to put on her steel toecapped sandals and clamber on the trucks, dragging netting, sorting scrap... In later years, as an international woman of mystery, she would often smile, remembering the joy of finding treasure, hamster cages, barbieferraris, old toasters in papa's skipyard as she worked the giant grab....................

....Phew!

It must be the weather! Or maybe it's just TopSkips first class skip hire service, but here's a lovely message we got today from a customer in Hampshire. Thanks a million!

What a day, not one but three skip hire testimonials in a day! What can we say, but: Thanks a million! Your feedback is always really appreciated.

If you want to leave a voice testimonial yourself, feel free to call 0207 6694 304 (choose option 1 and use code 9396)

Here's the first one:

Here's the second one:

and this one is very garbled, but we made out the words "Exceptional" and "services" and "topskips" and "thankyou":

The news is simply that skip hire prices are going up - not because the industry is profiteering, but because of rising fuel costs and the recent announcement by the Government that landfill tax is rising by £8/tonne from 1st April to £32/tonne.

This means that skip hire prices across the country will be rising by between 10% and a whopping 35%!

Although we aim to recycle most of the waste we collect, this tax rise has an industry-wide effect on the waste management industry.

We don't like to report price rises, but we wanted to inform you of the price rises coming.

If you have any requirement for skip hire this year, you can beat the price rise by ordering your skips before April 1st.

You can, as always, do this online anytime using your credit/debit card on our safe and secure server, or by PayPal or Google Checkout at www.topskips.com

OR, just call our friendly team on 08000 82 10 82 and we'll do the rest.

We love it when we get emails like this today for our skip hire services:

"Hello
I just wanted to write and let you know how pleased I have been with your service to date. I have been dealing with Catherine from your sales (?) department and have been throughly impressed by how easy it is to work with your company. I have phoned a few times and changed times, dates etc and have always been treated with the same cheery demeanour.

Many thanks to Top Skips but importantly Catherine!

Regards,

Tracy Crowe
CoSO
Northern Ireland"

Well done to Catherine for keeping up our world class customer service ethics. Here's a picture of her taken today being shy as she was told the good news:

We had a customer yesterday saying she had something unusual to be taken away.

When we asked what, the lady calmly said “HORSE SHIT”

Oh, the glamour of working in the skip hire industry....