Features

The success of timed online auctions for London’s big auction houses is putting the format on the map for other salerooms too.

While fairs remain a vital part of the art market calendar, the rich series of gallery selling exhibitions in Mayfair and St James’s this summer offer more chances to view and buy – at a different pace.

For close to three centuries buyers of art and antiques have been spoilt for choice in London. A city synonymous with archives, galleries, museums, conservators and curators, it continues to support long-standing streets of antiques dealers, centres and a plethora of regular fairs and markets. As this guide to the hotspots suggests, most of them are complementary rather than in competition, and all budgets are catered for.

As the battle for the ‘middle market’ heats up, the London auction scene today offers visitors a wider choice of items to buy and more places to bid for them.

With a longer run and back to being branded as an independent event, the venerable Art & Antiques Fair Olympia remains a stalwart for both the collector’s market and the decorative trade.

For the British art and antiques trade, the summer ‘season’ still carries plenty of resonance, particularly in London. The days of rowing club colours at Henley and Georgian walnut at the Grosvenor House Hotel have given way to the plethora of June and July showpiece auctions and a clutch of fairs and dealer-led events – London Art Week, Olympia, Masterpiece London, and new kid on the block Fair For Saatchi.

Britain still has many ‘antiques’ towns and streets – those picturesque corners of the island populated by shops, galleries and centres that together act as a magnet for antiques tourists. Two of the largest communities of dealers close to London are Petworth and Hungerford, while a busy schedule of regular fairs and markets takes place to the south-west of London.

Housed in a remarkable purpose-built marquee, Masterpiece London returns to the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea for its tenth anniversary

Desmond Morris on his many lives as a zoologist, painter, author and collector

Golden Age collaboration between two London clockmakers leads a look at the market including hammer highlights, auction previews and dealer news.

Remarkably, of the approximately 110 clockmakers recorded working in Lewes from the mid-17th to the early 19th centuries, as many as 10 were operating almost side-by-side at this town on the River Ouse in the late 18th century.

By the 1980s, Thomas Mercer of St Albans had made almost a third of all chronometers in history – including that used by Ernest Shackleton to navigate his men to Elephant Island and eventual rescue during the Trans-Arctic Expedition of 1914.

This c.1790 Georgian mahogany bracket clock by John Scott is among the stock of Olde Time Fine Antique Clocks & Barometers, which holds its second open weekend this summer.

Undoubtedly the most evocative account of the workshop of the celebrated clockmaker Joseph Knibb comes from a letter written by the Restoration-era politician Richard Legh (1635-87) of Lyme Hall in Cheshire to his young wife, Elizabeth.

Eardley Norton, who is listed at 49 St John’s Street, Clerkenwell between 1762- 94, enjoyed a reputation as a skilled mechanic and the maker of complex timepieces, sometimes with musical and astronomical movements.

The series of Victorian carriage clocks by James McCabe – the son of a Belfast clockmaker of the same name who came to London in the 1770s and worked at the Royal Exchange from 1804 – are typically beautifully made with exemplary twin fusee striking movements.

On July 2 Sotheby’s will hold the first of a four-part series of sales to disperse an important collection of clocks and pocket watches.

Estimated at a token £100-200, a large twin fusee wall clock sold to an online bid of £2400 (plus premium) at Wessex Auction Rooms (17% buyer’s premium) in Chippenham.

A rare regulator bracket clock signed by Thomas Cole was among a fine selection of English 18th and 19th century horology offered by Hutchinson-Scott (20% buyer’s premium) in Skipton, North Yorkshire, on May 23.

During an expedition to the wreck of the Titanic in 1996, a marine chronometer made by JW Ray, Liverpool, was recovered and brought ashore.