Clocks, Watches & Jewellery

London Bridge is falling down, goes the song. A bit further upstream, it turns out that the Houses of Parliament are actually doing the falling down.

A temporary export bar has been placed on the coronet designed for Queen Victoria by her husband Prince Albert, giving UK buyers an opportunity to raise the £5m (plus £1m VAT) asking price to keep it in the country.

The imminent arrival of Crossrail services in London are threatening the character of the Hatton Garden jewellery quarter.

New London books and works on paper specialists Forum Auctions plan to hold their first jewellery and watches sale in November following the appointment of Andrea de Miglio as the head of a new department.

A skull and crossbones ring or a skeleton on a chain are now likely to be seen hanging from a Goth looking like they have just stepped out of a Tim Burton film or heading for the biannual Whitby music fest.

Sotheby’s established an auction record for a watch by John Arnold (1736-99) when a large silver pocket chronometer of 1781 sold at £460,000.

The 28th edition of the Paris ‘Biennale des Antiquaires’ will include a radical shake-up of its jewellery content.

Jewellery specialists Symbolic & Chase have doubled the size of their premises with a move into an additional floor of their building in Mayfair.

A classic Chinese-made European style automaton clock or ‘Sing Song’ sold for $1.27m (£907,140) at Fontaine’s in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

A rare Rolex Submariner took a record £160,000 plus buyer’s premium at a Gardiner Houlgate sale in Wiltshire on May 25.

Bonhams are launching into the internet-only auction arena with a timed sale of watches from a single-owner collection of a European nobleman.

A watch by Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747-1823) became the second most expensive piece by the Swiss maker when it sold to a private Swiss museum for triple-estimate SFr3.25m (£2.35m) including premium at Christie’s Geneva.

The Oppenheimer Blue diamond set the world record for any jewel sold at auction at Christie’s Geneva yesterday.

The Palm Beach Show Group have announced the launch of a new fair in Miami Beach.

A rotting old caravan propped up on a farm might not sound like the kind of place you’d expect to discover a valuable family heirloom. But for a Devon-based furniture restorer, it proved just that when they found an Art Deco brooch believed to be a rare piece hiding within the contents of the van.

A medieval ring long associated with Joan of Arc sold for £240,000 – almost 30 times its estimate – at Timeline Auctions in Bloomsbury on February 25.

Sotheby’s London will be showing hundreds of previously unseen jewellery drawings in a one-off exhibition from February 18-March 8, sourced from a privately owned collection of jewellery and silver.

The market for traditional antiques ended 2015 on a high with a series of spectacular individual prices posted in London and New York in mid-December.

One of the most ambitious dealer selling exhibitions of recent memory – the Tom Scott collection of clocks at Carter Marsh – has concluded with market-defining sales for the Winchester dealership.

This gold and peacock blue enamel necklace designed by Archibald Knox sold for £31,000 at Mallams in Oxford.