If you are restoring a distressed old property, and want every detail to be absolutely right, then Charles Brooking is the man to go to for advice. He is the owner of the Brooking Collection, the largest archive of original architectural features of its kind in Europe, housed at the University of Greenwich, in southeast London. What he doesn’t know about Regency fireplaces, Victorian door handles, windows, knockers or skirting mouldings simply isn’t worth knowing.

Finding him might be a problem.

He could be in one of the two former stables in Greenwich, or the vast store in nearby Woolwich, which between them house a large part of his collection. Thousands of pieces from the past five centuries, including windows, doors, fanlight sections and even boot scrapers, fill every inch of space.

In the end, I find him half hidden under precious clutter in one of the giant sheds in the garden of his Arts and Crafts-style home, outside Cranleigh, Surrey. Brooking, 54, bought the three-bedroom house and its extensive outbuildings nine years ago for £180,000. He has converted the 45ft x 25ft joinery into a gallery and knocked together 14 former garages to form his main store.

Another shed, 30ft x 18ft, is dedicated to ironmongery.

“This is what I call my Surrey chapter,” he says. “I have a lot of Voysey here and Lutyens, with quite a bit of Thackeray, Turner and Arts and Crafts pieces. And you must see my doors from the royal box at Wembley stadium. Aren’t they amazing?”

As Brooking leads the way through the sheds, past a window from Windsor Castle, it is obvious he still gets a thrill from the finds he has spent decades and “hundreds of thousands of pounds” building up. He has sash windows from Buckingham Palace, a chunk of the Treasury and a sweep of balustrade from a house once owned by Pete Townshend of the Who.

“Just imagine who has passed through here,” he says, holding one of the back doors from 10 Downing Street. “Churchill would have walked through that door when he was holding talks with world leaders and his generals in the war.”

So keen is Brooking to evangelise about door knobs and the beauties of the box sash, he is launching courses for homeowners, based at his house, on Saturday afternoons. He talks in a seamless rush of dates, erudition and anecdotes. He was brought up in Guildford, Surrey. His mother, Edith, was a renowned socialite – a friend of Laurence Olivier, Noël Coward and Lord Mountbatten. It was she, more than his businessman father, Arthur, who provided the inspiration for Brooking’s acquisitive habits. “Mother had an affair with my prep-school master, who got me started as a collector,” he recalls. “ ‘Here’s your door knockers; go away and play with them,’ he’d say to me. ‘Now, Edith, what about some rumpty-tumpty on the sofa?’ ” Brooking’s hobby quickly became an obsession. For his 15th birthday, he asked for a shed in the family garden in which to store stuff – even then his idea of a good time was struggling back on the train from a building site with a hob grate and a fireplace under his arm. In 1971, he went to work for a firm of furniture restorers – but, a purist even then, he left when he discovered the boss was artificially distressing pieces to enhance their value. He moved to Sotheby’s, followed by a spell in the British Rail architect’s office.

Brooking has devoted much of his life to his personal collection, developing a passion for the parts of old buildings that most people overlook. Eventually, the rest of the world caught up with him: the appeal of objects dismissed as scrap in the 1960s and 1970s is now widely recognised. Brooking is a part-time senior lecturer at the University of Greenwich. “I have a highly tuned visual awareness,” he explains. “Details of design, texture and colour have always fascinated me.”

Brooking’s collection charts the history of domestic interiors in this country. Some of his pieces are already on display, or stacked neatly with a label attached; thousands of others are stored with carefree abandon, awaiting cataloguing.

“You’ll find intricate mouldings in the main rooms of important pre1930s houses, but there’ll be nothing so ornate in the servants’ quarters – no picture rail, even, and only a plain fireplace,” Brooking says. “Then, in the 1930s, social boundaries became blurred. The lady of the house would use the servants’ sitting room herself, so it became more comfortable. These objects show us how we lived.”

The mass of objects doesn’t quite tell the full story – yet. Brooking is looking for volunteers to create order from this great tangle of architectural salvage. “My nightmare is that I’ll die, and all of this will be considered an eccentric’s hobby,” he says. “This must be made into a proper study collection of artefacts.”

In the meantime, he’s off to Scotland – “to rescue some windows”.

To visit, attend a course or volunteer, e-mail cbbrooking@tiscali.co.uk

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