UK

THOUGH not a first class copy, a 1632 edition offered as part of this first Bath sale of the year at Bonhams was still a highly desirable and scarce item and brought the day’s top bid of £17,000 from Maggs.

Good stock furniture dominated this 894-lot wide-ranging sale on 13 December at Heathcote Ball sourced from various private sources in Leicestershire and Derbyshire.

NOT the top seller at this 653-lot Suffolk sale at Abbotts on 19 December but interesting in that it sold at all, was a burr walnut Victorian davenport.

HOME Counties antiques entrepreneur James Podger is on the move again with his Great Grooms Antiques Centres. It was some eight years ago that Mr Podger saw there was a big future in the trade for smart, well-run centres featuring good dealers with quality stock.

The final ceramics auction in London last year was the glass sale held at Sotheby’s Olympia on December 18. The top priced lot at £50,000 was this damaged but rare North German covered goblet of c.1675, painted and signed by Johann Anton Carli of Andermach am Rhein with a scene of Christ and the woman of Samaria.

The 102 lots of European ceramics that rounded off Christie’s (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) December 13 furnishing sale at King Street had, despite a degree of softness to the Meissen market, a generally high take-up for that factory, with 18 of the 25 lots of tablewares and figures changing hands and some strong individual results.

If 1930s Blackpool looks like a British version of the Italian Riviera it is because this poster advertisement, right, was designed by a Neapolitan watercolourist, Fortunino Matania, for the LMS railway company whose trains serviced the Lancashire resort.

CONTINUING the tradition of the old Phillips network, the Sevenoaks branch of new owners Bonhams moved to Ramster, the Surrey stately home for a winter event offering some of the better pieces consigned to the company’s various rooms in the South East.

Longer opening hours and a free parking system are to be introduced at Sotheby’s Olympia rooms from next month. The auctioneers have reached an agreement with the local Hammersmith and Fulham council to open an hour earlier at 9am from February.

Villa Bombrini Sale: TWO days before their main mixed owner European furniture sale, Christie’s also offered a separate single owner auction – Furniture and Works of Art removed from Villa Bombrini, ‘Il Paradiso’, Genoa – on December 11. Just over 300 lots were offered, of which three quarters found buyers – selling to the tune of £1,134,280.

LONDON is especially strong on niche events and specialist fairs do not come much more quintessentially English than The Watercolours and Drawings Fair which will be held for the fourth time at the Park Lane Hotel, Piccadilly, London W1 from January 31 to February 3.

ARMS & ARMOUR: Academic importance doesn’t always equate with financial interest, but in the case of the item pictured here, a 16th century close helmet, which went under the hammer at Sotheby’s Olympia (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) on December 7, there was a happy concurrence between the two.

STRONG private interest from well beyond the local area meant the trade, drawn mainly from the North and across the Border but also including dealers from Kent and as far as Holland, faced stern competition at this 1100-lot Cumbrian sale at Mitchells on 6-7 December.

A large collection of theatrical, character costumes and accessories provided the Canterbury rooms with an out-of-the-ordinary offering which attracted surprisingly wide interest.

Tattered and blackened, possibly by fire, this pair of William IV Gillows mahogany library chairs had been consigned by a local restorer to Willingham Auctions, near Cambridge, for sale on December 29.

IT was apparent on the second day of the first major fair of the year, The LAPADA Antiques and Fine Art Fair which opened at Birmingham’s NEC on January 16, that there is no marked upturn in business following a despondent 2001.

FOR a long time now, Kent antique prints dealer Ingrid Nilson, who is a member of and director of LAPADA, has been a well-known figure in the antiques trade, but in recent years her highly decorative stock has been sought after by interior designers.

NEXT week the British fair, which some 17 years ago was the first to cater seriously for the home and, more importantly, the transatlantic decorative trade, opens in its marquee at Battersea Park.

THIS was the second sale for the West Midlands firm Fieldings Auctioneers who got off to a tough start by holding their first sale in October when the market was reacting to the September 11 attacks.

A new world record was set at Spink’s sale of Medals, Orders and Decorations (ODM) on December 10. The group of medals won by Air Vice-Marshal (as he became) “Johnnie” Johnson were sold for £241,500 (including premium).