The Silver Palm Leaf: How a Credit Card Pipe Took Over 1994 – and Why It’s Back

In 1993, a small pipe meant a little carved wooden thing off a market stall for a quid. Then two Londoners turned up with a flat slab of stainless steel the size of a credit card – a hole at one end and a winding channel hidden inside – and within a year it was in The Face, Time Out, the Daily Mail, on BBC2 and in the V&A.

That was the Silver Palm Leaf. We opened Willy Banjo the same year.

The press scrapbook: City Life, The Face, Sky Magazine and Time Out, 1993–94

Two Londoners and a crop circle

The Silver Palm Leaf was designed by James Hassal and Nick Montefiore – Nick an Exeter graduate who’d walked out of merchant banking, James our mate Jamie (more on him below). They built the prototypes, tried them out on friends, and had around a thousand advance orders before they’d even started production.

Inside the steel is about 32cm of channel, folded back and forth in a pattern the press loved to compare to a crop circle. The smoke cools on its way through – that’s the whole point. The name, Jamie explained at the time, came from three things: it’s silver, it fits in the palm of your hand, and the inside looks like the ribs of a leaf.

The year everybody wrote about it

The Face, December 1993 – when it cost £27.50

The cuttings from the time read like a who’s who of 90s print:

• The Face, December 1993 – one of the first write-ups, with the pipe on sale at £27.50 and its little tag promising it would last into the next century.
• February 1994 – named Pipe of the Month.
• The Independent, August 1994 – featured it in their “in thing” column, reporting it was selling out everywhere from the Conran Shop to hippy huts in seaside towns.
• Time Out and City Life, summer 1994 – listed it at the Conran Shop in the Michelin Building, Alchemy on Portobello Road and Aero on Westbourne Grove, by then at £29.95.
• Sky Magazine, October 1994 – called it the hippest accessory of the moment.
• BBC2’s Design Awards – picked from thousands of entries to feature on the programme.

Pipe of the Month, February 1994

Not all the coverage was friendly. The Daily Mail ran a page-three panic piece about it, the Pipe Club of London sniffed that a decent briar would do, and Jamie wrote to Time Out to put them straight on what it was designed for. Nothing sells a design classic quite like the Daily Mail being cross about it.

It ran in Viz for years too – about as British as an advert gets.

From Portobello Road to the V&A

The design world took it seriously. It was exhibited at the Design Museum in 1994, and the Victoria and Albert Museum took one into its permanent collection – the V&A’s own record lists it as given by the makers and shown in their Streetstyle exhibition, as part of an outfit representing British subculture of 1993–94. It’s still there.

The music crowd liked it as well. Jay Kay from Jamiroquai famously got one out mid-interview on Carlton TV’s The Beat, tucked inside a Jamiroquai cigarette packet – the footage got cut. According to the makers, Jamiroquai, Zion Train and Mute Records all had personalised versions made.

The day Jay Kay got one out on telly

The pipe that started a wave

Be fair to it: it wasn’t the first clever pipe ever made. Over in California, the Proto Pipe – machined brass, made since around 1970 – had been going for over twenty years, and that was about the only thing in the same league. But here in Britain, nothing like the Silver Palm Leaf existed. Pipes were carved wood or cheap tin, and that was it.

What the Silver Palm Leaf proved was that people would pay for a pipe that was engineered rather than carved. From behind our counter we watched the wave that followed it – Agent Blue, BudBomb (still going strong), Red-Eye’s Amazed and plenty more. Thirty-odd years on, the metal pipe shelf in the shop owes a lot to a slab of steel the size of a credit card.

We know the man behind it

We met Jamie around 30 years ago – he rang us up, and then we kept running into each other at festival after festival. We became proper friends at the London trade shows and ended up sharing stalls. He’s one of the funniest men alive, and we’re still mates now. So when the Silver Palm Leaf came back, there was only ever one answer about stocking it.

See the full story on the Silver Palm Leaf website.

What’s new in the Mk III

The Mk III – made in Britain

The new version is made in Britain by British engineers, and it isn’t just a reissue. According to the makers:

• Deeper, re-milled air channels for a smoother draw and less cleaning
• Better bowl cooling, so it’s more comfortable to hold
• The same credit-card size (78 x 50 x 5mm), the same stainless steel, the same magnetic back plate that lifts off with a fingernail

£29.95 in 1994, £49.99 now – for something built to last another 30 years.

Keep it running

The bowl takes 18mm screens. We stock genuine Silver Palm Leaf spare gauzes – five to a packet, in packs of 10, 15 or 20 packets.

Get one

• Silver Palm Leaf Credit Card Pipe – latest version, made in Britain
• Silver Palm Leaf Spare Gauzes
• The full Silver Palm Leaf range
• More metal pipes

Want more from the same era? Here’s what we were up to: 21 years at Glastonbury Festival and the year we worked Knebworth for Oasis.