At the Piano Shop Bath, redundant pianos are being dismantled and reborn as striking artworks and a finely crafted instrument. Through Jon Kelly’s Played & Remade initiative, century-old wood, brass and iron are finding new voices – including a remarkable acoustic guitar built from the heart of a once-loved piano. Words by Simon Horsford. Images by TBM.
It’s an unusual concept: take one beautifully crafted – and redundant – piano, dismantle it and use the components to fashion something completely different and yet equally captivating. The most recent result of this enticing fusion of music and art is a finely crafted acoustic guitar, while previous transformations have seen artists create a variety of arresting sculptures.
Played & Remade, the brainchild of Jon Kelly of the Piano Shop Bath, who refers to his initiative as “being playful with waste”, and kicked it all off in May 2024. Two years down the line, it remains an offshoot of his shop on the London Road, as aside from selling pianos, his main role, Kelly explains, the outlet “disposes of old upright pianos and we recycle up to six a week. There’s a lot that date back over 100 years old that were produced for the British market when the statistic is supposed to be that one in three houses had a piano. That was the entertainment, notTVs, PlayStation, the internet and then rest of it. So there is a glut of these pianos.
“Recycling is a constant in the industry with 95 per cent [of pianos] being surplus to requirements as they are problematic to restore,” says Kelly. As it isn’t always cost effective to bring them back to life, Kelly started his scheme looking at how to use the material that goes into building pianos, so making the most of the craftsmanship, rather than just seeing it literally go to waste.
“We’ve always been very creative in design,” adds Kelly, “we were one of the first retailers to supply painted pianos in the UK.” I spot a funky red piano and a white one covered in illustrations, while everything from green to blue as well as dark grey is available. They also designed the pianos for the last two Coldplay albums.
An example of their creativity can also be seen in their eye-catching piano-key window display, “the keys are from at least 10 pianos,” says Kelly. “People know that display and we keep working with artists to reimagine it, the challenge for any artist that works with us on that display is to work around the keys.”
Kelly says the initial plan back in 2024 was to “put the call out to artists because it was a bit of a random idea, but the engagement was great and everyone loved the challenge of working with the material [from the old pianos] and saw it [rare woods, cast iron, brass, felt and copper] in a different way and it was interesting hearing how they would go about interpreting the materials.” The materials were free too.
Some of the resultant artworks were extraordinary, one sculptor, unusually, rebuilt a whole piano but pitched on its side, while local artist Victoria Topping used various parts of a piano to make a mask-like sculpture entitled Spirit of Professor Longhair. A stag’s head and an owl’s head were some of the creations of Mark Hackworthy, a technician at the Piano Shop, while Clare Burnett refashioned old piano legs to make the colourful Chromatic Variations.
An even more intriguing angle came when Kelly was approached by Bath-based Gary Leddington, who specialises in custom hand-built guitars, with an idea to make a guitar from old piano parts. “When Gary first came in to the shop [after hearing about Played & Remade], he asked to see the waste material and came to us with the idea of a guitar.” Taking up the story, Leddington adds his vision “was to make an instrument that was a guitar but at the same time, I wanted to have elements that hark back to that fact that it used to be a piano. Some of the details like the end wedge and the head stock, I’ve incorporated directly from the piano using the brass inlays, which are the traditional maker’s mark on a piano.” Look too in the sound hole and Leddington has put a strip which visually represents a piano’s white and black keys, using an actual ebony black key and piano hammer.
As Kelly points out, when he showed what was available from an old piano to an artist, “they’ve never seen this as ‘waste’ before, as when you look at a piano, you see the exterior, and only have a perception of what’s on the inside, but that’s where the value and the craftsmanship lies. So when someone like Gary sees the internal workings and all the mechanisms and what he could potentially be working with, he sifted through it and gave us a shopping list and said that’s what I need to make my item.”
And in this instance, the resultant acoustic guitar, which Leddington hands to me, is truly remarkable – a work of musical art, if you will. It took about six months on and off to make and as Leddington says “in building a guitar, there are certain things you need – a certain size of wood for the neck and back and sides [the parts came from several pianos]. I took some soundboard material – from the back of the piano where most of the resonance comes from – and used it as the top; it’s made from spruce. Then I made the back and the sides, which came from a grand [piano] lid, which I believe was circa 200 years old and is walnut. Everything on the guitar is recycled from the piano, except for the tuner mechanisms, the strings, the saddle and the bridge pins, even the tuner buttons are recycled from old piano brass.
“It’s definitely one of the most resonant instruments I’ve made,” he adds, “it sounds both new and old and it’s got an aged, vintage vibe to it acoustically.”
The reason for that, says Leddington, who is also the art department technician and gallery coordinator at Bath Spa University, is that “if you take something like a Stradivari violin, one of the theories as to why they are so good is that you have 300 years of it being played as an instrument and that does something to the wood and makes it what it is over time. And the idea that you take the wood from an instrument [such as a piano] that has been played for years, having those vibrations going through it and [then] use that to make a new guitar was really attractive. And dismantling it doesn’t affect that.”
The guitar was bought by Kelly at the Piano Shop, “I am a modest guitarist and I just appreciated Gary’s effort and investment in the whole thing and the delivery is incredible but we are happy to sell it”, The storytelling aspect of the guitar – its previous history as being made from parts of old pianos, should add to its appeal – adds Kelly. All the artworks on display in the London Road shop are for sale.
“This is refined instrument making,” suggests Kelly, “and we have this guitar as a kind of a pilot. Other people could approach The Piano Shop and ask for an instrument to be made.” So the pianos may no longer be viable in their original form but the materials used to make them are being used “to give them a second life”.
Having said that, Kelly adds, occasionally they do come across a gem: “We bought a Steinway recently that had been family owned from new so that will be over 100 years old. It will be fully restored and then the journey starts again, but that happens only around 10 per cent of the time.” Another story comes via an old and battered piano donated by King Edward’s School. “It had unusual concave keyboard,” says Kelly, “so Mark [Hackworthy] said ‘can I do something with it’”. He completely rebuilt it and it can be seen in all its glory in the shop window; King Edward’s are even thinking of now buying it back.
Such out-of-the-box thinking is all well and good, but Kelly, who is originally from Liverpool, says selling and restoring pianos remains his prime focus. The shop has been in Bath for 40 odd years and was started by Kelly’s father in Widcombe before the business moved to its current location. “People are still buying pianos, but it’s a tough industry”, although he says a while back someone came in and bought a grand piano and several pieces of art “because she loves music and art.” Digital pianos start around £500 and can go up to £8,000; an acoustic costs from £1,700 to “the sky’s the limit – a Bechstein might go for £200,000 through a dealer.”
The shift in the popularity of buying pianos in the UK is also reflected in where they are now manufactured. Ninety per cent now come from Asia – Japan, China, Indonesia – with Yamaha the biggest producers worldwide. In the heyday of production there were some 100 manufacturers around London now there are none; one of the last major ones, until the early 2000s, was the British Piano Manufacturing Company in Stroud. Elsewhere, adds Kelly, “there are some European ones such as Steinway, Büchner and Bechstein and few smaller brands.”
As to the future, Kelly says, “the beauty of Played and Remade is that it’s got more scope than we can do with it. In a way somebody needs to take it to the next step. It needs to evolve. It needs focus
and investment. I’m a retailer but I’d like to protect it and let it live and [for it] to be a legacy, but in marketing and commercial terms, it needs to scale up.”
And ultimately, the proof that this initiative works is in Leddington’s lovingly crafted acoustic guitar, the various artworks and the occasional refashioned piano, all of which are a testament to the creativity, craftsmanship and sustainability involved in giving a once cherished instrument a new life.
For further information visit: thepianoshopbath.co.uk or for more details about Gary’s handmade guitars, visit: leddingtonguitars.com