Regional Fairs

ON Friday and Saturday, February 23 and 24, the Royal Bath and West Showground at Shepton Mallet will host the largest postcard, tradecard, postal history and ephemera fair in the UK.

THERE’S a fairs reshuffle in the medieval town of Rye in East Sussex.

MISSING Book Fairs, named after the fairs’ eponymous organiser, Chris Missing, are moving one of their six events from one stately home to another.

JUDITH Lidell is celebrating the success of her first vintage fashion fair on her home patch of Newcastle-on-Tyne on Sunday November 19.

ANDY Briggs of Fat Cat Fairs has added Woodstock Antiques Fairs to his other three fairs. However, for the next six months at least the name will not change and it will not be incorporated into Fat Cat’s/Silhouette Fairs’ other events at Abingdon, Burford and Lechlade.

ALLEN Lewis Fairs will not be continuing to organise their antiques fairs held biannually at Portmeirion Town Hall in March and November.

FOUNDED in 1893, Malvern Girls College in Great Malvern, Worcestershire was housed in a building that was once a grand hotel in the town’s heyday as a spa.

DMG Antiques Fairs have sold the two Malvern fairs as part of their widespread revamp.

DISCOVERY Real Time are filming at Take Five’s Art Nouveau/Deco Fair at Woking on Sunday, October 29 for their 10-part Real Deal series which focuses on two dealers selling their pieces.

VINTAGE fashion fair organiser Edwin Dyson has banned the sale of fur at his events.

“THE Shelley Group has only one public fair each year and this is its 20th staging since the group was organised back in 1986. This must be a pretty good record for a collectors’ group,” says the group’s Martin Kent.

SOON after setting up on Friday morning a few weeks ago at Shepton Mallet a flash flood swept through the Edmund Rack building leaving stallholders hastily packing up again and huddling by the entrance.

EVER since the recognition in 1855 of the potential of a 93-acre site close to the Devon town of Newton Abbot, there’s been a fine tradition of competitive horseracing.

JAY Fairs’ Joy O’Meara is holding her Winter Antiques and Collectors’ Fleamarket at Didcot Civic Hall, Didcot, Oxfordshire on Sunday October 8.

FINCHCOCKS, a Georgian mansion near Goudhurst in Kent, now the Finchcocks Music Museum, is home to owner and pianist Richard Burnett’s collection of more than 100 historic keyboard instruments, many in full playing condition.

A LONGSTANDING tradition going back over 30 years has resulted in an annual antiques fair in Cranleigh, Surrey supporting Leonard Cheshire, the UK’s largest charity for the disabled, which takes place this year on Saturday October 14 at Cranleigh Village Hall.

BEYOND France is the name of Maud Lombard’s linen company, but it is actually Hungary where Maud sources her homespun, handspun vintage linens in and around the village of Nagynyarad in the south west of the country, near the city of Pecs.

EAST Anglia's top fairs circuit, Lomax Antiques Fairs, has been sold to John Harbottle, a regular exhibitor at Lomax events.

BRUSSELS FAIR PREVIEW Over 100 dealers – half from abroad – will gather in Brussels from June 8-12.

AS Easter approaches life is picking up apace on the provincial fairs scene.