Fairs and Markets

ORGANISER Sue Ede of Cooper Antiques Fairs is promising “an antiques event of a quality not seen before in the West Country” with this weekend’s launch of her West Country Antiques Fair at Powderham Castle, near Exeter. It seems a bold claim but, on reflection, there have not been that many successful quality fairs in the West Country so Mrs Ede may well be on safe ground.

HOT on the heels of the upmarket, well-established Palm Beach Classic, the brand new Palm Beach Jewellery and Antique Show will be launched from February 13 to 17 at the same venue, the new Palm Beach Convention Center. The event is fully booked with a hefty 225 dealers but the astonishing fact is that no fewer than 70 of these are from the UK.

SPECIALIST organisers Oxbridge Fairs have made a change of venue for their third Cambridge Glass Fair. It will be held on Sunday February 15 outside the city at Chilford Hall Vineyard, Linton, which is also the site of fine art printers the Curwen Press.

TALISMAN Fairs would like to point out that they are pressing ahead with all their dates in both Bristol and Bath.

FOLLOWING her first London fair of the year, East Sussex organiser Caroline Penman moves to the country for her popular Spring Petersfield Antiques Fair which will run at the Festival Hall in the Hampshire town from February 6 to 8.

There is an impressively international roll-call of galleries exhibiting at Collect, the new fair for contemporary objects which takes place at the Victoria & Albert Museum from February 20-24.

Pictures and furniture were the commodities in demand at a busy Tatton Park Fair which Robert Bailey held from January 9 to 11. The Essex organiser regularly tends to pick up quite a bit of business at this early-year venue.

Showhome is a Dulwich-based company run by ex-fashion journalist Lucy Ryder Richardson and ex-graphic designer Petra Curtis, who, frustrated by not being able to find the kind of 20th century and contemporary furniture and artefacts they liked locally, formed a sourcing and selling business.

Important Summer diary date, the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair will be held in London from June 8 to 15 with the private preview on June 8 and the Charity Gala Reception on June 10.

FAR from mourning the demise of the January LAPADA fair, which ran for 13 years at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre, the trade seem to have embraced its successor, The National Fine Art and Antiques Fair, which will be launched at this favoured venue from January 28 to February 1.

SOUTH London organiser Paola Francia-Gardner, who operates as P&A Antiques, is reviving her London Glass Fair which will be held on Sunday March 7 at the Chelsea Village Hotel, Stamford Bridge, Fulham Road, SW6.

SINCE the 1970s, the new year’s fairs scene in the capital has always really got underway with Caroline Penman’s West London Antiques and Fine Art Fair, which will be held this week from January 15 to 18 at Kensington Town Hall, W8.

Organisers of Spain’s top antiques fair Feriarte, held last November 22 to 30 at Madrid’s Juan Carlos I Exhibition Centre, report the 200 exhibitors between them sold 6317 items. The gate was 37,147.

ESSEX organiser Robert Bailey travelled North at the end of December and saw the new year in at Harrogate where from January 2 to 4 he held his Harrogate Pavilions Antiques and Fine Art Fair.

LAPADA have confirmed that they will proceed with their new 2004 fairs programme but have put the Cheltenham event back by two weeks.

THERE will be even greater English trade interest in one of the big success stories of recent years on the New York fairs scene – The New York Ceramics Fair. The fair, which has expanded from four to five days and will run at the National Academy of Design Museum, 1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, from January 14 to 18 with a preview party on the evening of January 13.

THERE is a deal of trade excitement at the latest initiative of that accomplished organiser Fran Foster, who from January 28 to February 1 launches the National Fine Art and Antiques Fair at The National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham.

TO many Americans, Manhattan’s annual Winter Antiques Show is the most prestigious fair in the land. It is certainly the most venerable since from January 16 to 25 (after a charity party on January 15) it celebrates a half century at New York’s Seventh Regiment Armory, Park Avenue at 67th Street.

THE veteran New York firm of fair organisers Wendy Management, a family firm who started putting shows together in 1934, are going rapidly upmarket, and they are taking some well-known European dealers with them.

LAST week, after two years of renovations, Judith and Phil Carrigan officially opened their Uzella Court Antiques Centre and Fine Art in the centre of Lostwithiel, Cornwall. The centre is housed in a partly medieval building which has been a shop of one sort or another – most recently a butcher’s – since 1850.