Proposed apartment plan represents big shift for Hampton s business parks dailypress.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailypress.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
IN Worcester’s long and sometimes colourful history there have been few figures more eccentric than William Laslett. He is best remembered today – if remembered he is at all by most people, as he was no Woodbine Willie or Edward Elgar – for a group of alms houses in Friar Street which bear his name. But they only scratch the surface of the Laslett legend. For this man, who dressed like a tramp and didn’t wash much, was the city’s MP for more than 20 years and the greatest benefactor it has ever known. The son of a local banker, he was a solicitor in the early 19th century, which proved to be a golden age for lawyers, as several other local families made fair sized fortunes at the same time.
Olmsted once tried to list every collection to his name, but gave up after number 100.
The banana labels have made it into his Top 13, the collections that interest him the most.
“When they come out with a new label, there are 20 or 50 variations of it,” said the 82-year-old. “It’s just hard to stop. I’ll be doing it on the last day I’m alive.”
A year ago, Olmsted sat behind a plastic folding table at Collectors Day at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Extravagant collectors lined the walls of the conference room, displaying their potato mashers, their pop-up books, their Olympic memorabilia. Olmsted’s layout of laminated photographs sat atop a red tablecloth.