One man's valve is another man's passion. Andy Duncan visits a hidden timeslip in radio land. Photos, Eric Echenberg.

There is nothing remotely unusual about the outside of the house.

Its modestly decorated exterior is much the same as any other of the late Victorian detached houses which comprise the suburbs of south London. Appropriately, and amongst other things, this definitively English building is the home of Gerald R. Wells, a man whose charming, generous and enthusiastic character would seem more suited to the gentle climes of a Boulting Brothers' Ealing film comedy than to hi-tech '85.

Gerry is enthusiastic about one thing: The Wireless.

He is so enthusiastic about The Wireless that he has devoted his life and his property to its restoration and preservation. Behind the innocent front door are well over a thousand exhibits of radio, gramophone and early television equipment — the largest private collection in Europe and the stuff of the 'Vintage Wireless Museum'.

It's both ironic and typical that no such national museum exists in this country, where so much pioneering work was carried out on the means of communication which still dominate our lives today. But no artificially created environment could match the atmosphere of the Wells' abode.

The decoration and furnishings of the sitting room are much as they were during Gerry's childhood in the 1930's. Even as the visitor takes a seat while Gerry puts the kettle on, curious and fascinating sights catch the eye. The sideboard-sized item blocking the fireplace is one of the first TV sets off the production line in 1936, when it was given to Lord Selsdon, then the Postmaster General, in recognition of his efforts in helping to create the first TV service.

Its horizontally-mounted, 9in screen was viewed by looking at the mirrored underside of its opened lid. A long lost pleasure since the BBC stopped transmission of 405-lines signals in January. However, having unplugged their last converter (about the size of a double wardrobe), they delivered it to Gerry and from the sanctuary of the Philips room (only recognisable as his bedroom by the evidence of a small bed in one corner) it now produces flickering images on the screens of the equally unlikely early sets dotted around the house.

Also located in the Philips room (so called because it's also crammed with radios made by that company), is Gerry's vintage DJ console: three 78 rpm turntables with massive railway-sleeper arms, a tape deck, and suspended microphone, with which Gerry broadcasts his messages and choices of 30's dance music throughout the museum, or to anyone in the immediate vicinity who happens to tune in.

But mostly, the place is bulging with radios. From all available vantage points, sets of every shape, size and style stand shoulder to shoulder. Each is a testament to the now quaint notion of a wireless being a visual as well as an aural treat — a piece of cabinet design in its own right, at once an integrated part of the household's furniture, with its subtle inlays and veneers, and the focus of the family's attention when the power was switched on and the dial's distant station names illuminated.

Upstairs is the room where Gerry was born, now largely given over to a stunning selection of portable sets, some of which, similar in weight and shape to a car battery, could only have appealed to Hercules or wheelbarrow owners. He has also re-created the interior of a wireless shop of the 1930's, complete with authentic packaged stock, counter, advertisements, testing equipment and even an open copy of the Radio Times for the customer's perusal (no, not one with the two Ronnies on the cover).

Having filled the house he needed more space for the growing collection and where better than the bottom of the garden? There lurks the source of his other enthusiasm: the garden shed. From an early age the young Wells rapidly developed into a shed builder par excellence. His current model, designed and constructed from scrap materials to be a 'half mock-Tudor tea room, half cricket pavilion', is like Dr Who's Tardis — modest enough from the outside but seems to go on forever once entered. (This may be due to the discovery that at least a third of it occupies the next door neighbour's garden.) This family's obliging nature has led to the creation of two more sizeable sheds.

The entire complex contains three more rooms full of exhibits, two woodwork shops, Gerry's own repair shop and spares store, and a valve laboratory where the man can make those valves which cannot be found in his cellar store of over 20,000. This is not a man given to taking chances. He even has a device with which he turns donated empty DAZ packets into perfectly cut and formed cardboard boxes for his valves.

Readers who conclude that such behaviour borders upon the obsessive will not be surprised to discover that most contemporaries of the junior Wells and his family would have agreed. After all, as Gerry recalls: "I was an absolute bore to other children. They wanted to play and I was only interested in electrical things. I went to school at the age of four and hated every minute of it. All I wanted was to get back to the box of electrical bits and pieces which I had accumulated. Mother discouraged it. Father, anything for a quiet life, gave in to it and would bring home these bits for me.

"Other relations also found me a pain in the neck, so whenever we had company I was encouraged to disappear to the bottom of the garden, where I've been ever since."

Given a broken crystal set at the age of six, "I had a set-to and rigged up an aerial and made it work. I was that sort of kid. Certainly by the age of eight or nine I was trying to construct radio sets, and by the time I was 12 I was going out in the evenings on a bicycle doing repairs. It was wartime and there weren't any engineers around. I probably damaged more sets than I repaired but I got some results."

By now Wells the student was also in conflict with his teachers. "They were very kind, understanding people but they had no time for anything technical or practical. All I wanted was radio and electronics when they were interested in religion and more academic subjects. It wasn't long before I started playing truant from there, raiding bombed houses for any radio or electrical bits, and it also wasn't very long before I got into trouble with the law. This meant Remand Home while I was psychoanalysed, and immediate expulsion from school. The psychiatrist reckoned that I had a single track mind, that it was a mania, and suggested other channels. The building trades perhaps.

"After seven months at the Brixton School of Building the same old trouble recurred and again I was expelled. This time I went well over the top and overnight removed all the electrical fittings from an empty vicarage. Then I went to town on the local radio shop in Norwood High Street — Archibald Roots. He had a small radio in his window which I decided that I ought to have, so on one Saturday afternoon I got some other kid to go in and distract his attention while I rushed in, snatched the radio, and made off with it on my bicycle. He was quicker than I thought and he chased me in his Austin 7 van all the way down the high street and caught me halfway up Chestnut Road.

"This of course meant immediate captivity, straight back into Remand Home. This time the Juvenile Court took things more seriously and I was sent to an approved school in Lancashire, the Liverpool Farm School. I arrived in January 1944 having given up all hope of having wireless or electronics as a career. It had been drummed into me that I was suffering from some sort of psychiatric malfunction, that radio was a disease. They almost managed to convince me!"

This unlikely location proved to be a turning point however, because here Wells-the-Offender encountered a kindred spirit — a member of staff as interested in the wireless as himself. After a happy year "mucking around with radios from morning 'till night", Gerry's case was reviewed by a magisterial friend of the family who, embarrassed to find him in court, offered an apprenticeship in joinery at his building firm as a fresh start. Three years later (1947) Wells the Chippie had made enough contacts amongst the firm's staff to open his own radio and television repair service. This, in turn became a PA company WADAR (Wells Amplified Development And Rentals), supplying systems for conferences, outdoor gatherings and, by the '60s, cinemas.

In 1966 Selective Employment Tax was introduced and had a devastating effect on business. By 1972 Gerry was facing mounting debts ("I was not a very good business manager") and failing health ("As well as a double hernia, I clocked up a heart attack, two slipped discs, a sebaceous cyst and topped it all off with a rather nice nervous breakdown").

By 1974 he was out of business. "I was then 44 and no one particularly wanted to employ me, not with the record that I'd racked up either as a juvenile criminal or an adult trader. I couldn't even get hire purchase.

"I decided that since everyone else was going forward, I would go backwards and I formed the Vintage Wireless Company. I would go back to what I understood, ancient radio. I had been repairing them all this time, I might as well carry on doing the same. It wasn't long after this that I also decided to turn over all this space to a radio museum and I started adding to my collection by rescuing all the sets that other people were chucking onto skips. What with the nervous breakdown, this confirmed what everyone had been thinking: I'd gone nuts."

From such humble origins the museum has blossomed to its present, magnificent state. Not a place that can be experienced in half an hour, in fact difficult to tear yourself away from after three or four. Partly this is due to the atmosphere created by somewhere frozen in time; partly to the infectious nature of Gerry's untiring enthusiasm as he guides visitors around the house, pausing every so often to explain the purpose of some Heath Robinson device and partly of course, to the exhibits themselves, which are more overwhelmingly beautiful and interesting than I can possibly describe here.

Should this not be inducement enough I can also inform you that Gerry offers a while-you-wait repair service, thanks to which my own sets, irretrievably dead I had thought, are now as good as new. Watching the man at work is, in itself, a treat. So the set you found in the loft/skip/junk shop can live again. A visit is no more than a phone call away and will cost you nothing. Gerry survives by doing repairs (£5 to £10 a time), enjoying the patronage of Paul Getty (who now pays the rates and electricity bills), and otherwise by the generosity of those visitors who care to contribute to the museum tea fund.

Meanwhile Gerry Wells enjoys local anonymity.

"Although people on the other side of the road don't know what happens here there are people on the other side of the world who do. Last week we had visitors from as far away as Swaziland, Norway and Barnet. Even old Archie Roots, who's now in his 80's, came round the other day. It's still a mania with me but I do feel that I've started something, that I've been the founder of the vintage wireless movement in this country. But you could hardly call this a museum, more a manifestation of a psychiatric condition."

Anyone genuinely interested in visiting the museum can contact Gerry through us on the One Two editorial number, (Contact Details).