Birmingham

A large sale of jewellery and watches from Suttons & Robertsons, London’s oldest pawnbrokers, is to be offered at Fellows of Birmingham on July 16.

Worcester Porcelain Museum will be launching a new look by unveiling items never seen before at the 'Antiques for Everyone' fair in July.

WHILE London auctions saw a 25% rise in value for 2011, sales outside the capital have also been growing.

THE Birmingham Assay Office is launching a new one-day course, Buying Scrap Gold and Silver, on January.

CONFUSION reigns over the Export Licensing Unit, whose proposed move to Birmingham from London in a bid to save money was delayed after protests from the London art market.

CHARLES Hampshire of Peter Francis auctioneers in Carmarthen has won the NAVA National Auctioneer of the Year Award.

BRITISH Art Market Federation chairman Anthony Browne is fighting a rearguard action against the unexpected news that the Export Licensing Unit is to move to Birmingham.

BIRMINGHAM auction house Biddle & Webb are to open a Wolverhampton office later this month.

A major new conference for antiques and fine art auctioneers will take place at the Hilton Hotel, Birmingham, NEC on Friday, April 24.

Fellows & Sons, the Birmingham-based auctioneers and valuers, are to expand their operation to London and have appointed Richard Slater to spearhead the initiative.

In celebration of Fellows & Sons’ 130th anniversary, students and practising goldsmiths were invited by the Birmingham-based auctioneers to submit a design for a piece of utilitarian silver.

THE winter Antiques For Everyone fair at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre has been brought forward a month to November 1 to 4 from November 29 to December 2.

After over 50 years as arms and armour auctioneers in the centre of Birmingham – and an association with the city of close to one and half centuries – Weller & Dufty are to close.

LAST year Fran Foster launched her new event, the National Fine Art & Antiques Fair, at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre and, from January 19 to 23, it returns to the Forum, which is arguably the most popular of the NEC’s many halls for antiques fixtures.

WEST Midlands Police have arrested three people from Birmingham in connection with the theft of Staffordshire figures from the Antiques for Everyone fair after the items were spotted on eBay.

AFTER June in London, the first major fair on the calendar is the long-established summer version of Antiques For Everyone at the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham. It will be held this year in Halls 17-19 from July 29 to August 1.

BEFORE the acceptance of the clay pigeon (patented in 1880) as the most suitable target for skeet shooting, there was glass ball shooting. Thought to originate in Britain in the 1830s, but quickly spreading to the United States, shooting at uniform spherical glass target balls was a recognised Victorian pastime that gathered momentum following the invention in 1877 of a trap capable of casting a missile through the air in a long arc.

ALTHOUGH catalogued as a late 18th century fruitwood apple form tea caddy, this finely turned and carved 5 1/2in (13cm) high vessel sold by Biddle & Webb (15% buyer’s premium) on April 1 was more accurately a melon.

THE large sums of money rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia collectors are prepared to part with for a complete set of Beatles autographs inevitably means the market is peppered with fakes. The watertight provenance of an early Beatles extended play record, Twist and Shout, Parlophone, 1963, signed to the sleeve by the Fab Four, was key to its success at Biddle & Webb’s (15% buyer’s premium) 511-lot sale of toys and juvenilia in Birmingham on May 21.

BIRMINGHAM auctioneers Biddle & Webb (15% buyer’s premium) have been holding regular decorative arts sales for some years now. Generally 20th century ceramics top the sales list and this was again the case at the April 16 sale when two 13in (33cm) examples of Drunken Bricklayer vases designed by Geoffrey Baxter for the Whitefriars pottery were major stars.