home | Local Time: 23rd February, 2012 10:52 AM
Diary of a Manic Collector
By Nicholas Thomas
Twenty-eight days - one thousand eight hundred miles - three countries - twenty-seven towns - forty-five antique centres - innumerable shops and three antique fairs. Time to lie down in a dark room.
All addicts need a means of disguising their habit. Ours were the relatives and friends we had ostensibly come to the UK to visit. Our route, while appearing impulsive and erratic, was dictated by where we could scrounge a bed each night, or most nights. Paying for accommodation is the killer on a tour around the UK, or around any country for that matter. In the end, nineteen of our twenty-eight nights cost us only a few bottles of wine. (Having a map of Britain handy might help you follow our strange meanderings).
Our base was a small village near Warwick, called Norton Lindsay. Our guide was Google, and our plan was simple: To visit as many antique outlets in Britain as we could. Oh, and see some relatives, if there was time! Although we both like fabulous old furniture, paintings and china, my collecting passion (some would say obsession) is playing cards, old ones preferably, while Veronica likes little things: baby irons, miniature chamber pots, small tea sets etc. A day to banish the jet lag and we're off. No time to lose!
Day 2: Warwick, Stratford, Tewksbury and Evesham. An easy round trip, although Stratford in the summer gets very busy; coaches everywhere and thousands of Japanese tourists taking photographs of
thousands of Japanese tourists taking photographs of...I blame Shakespeare myself. There is a great little antique shop in the square at Warwick, full of little things and all four towns have small antique centres
with twenty to forty dealers, which are worth a visit.
Day 3: Wetherby. Overnight at The Red Lion, £55 a night and a great little pub. Nearby Wetherby racecourse hosts an antique fair two or three times a year, although it's more like an up-market boot fair
than a true antiques fair. Not enormous compared with some fairs, two to three hundred stalls and as most of them are small local dealers or part-time dabblers the prices are reasonable and the bargaining
amenable, despite being in Yorkshire!
Day 4: Edinburgh, and a cottage for a week. This city is one big antique, and well worth a visit just to see it. Today there are very few antique shops; a sign of the financial woes besetting Britain? In Dundas
Street there are a couple of shops left, one of them being a little basement that is simply bursting with stuff, just like old junk shops used to be; it's a ferret's paradise and you could spend half a day down there.
Glasgow. Not as pretty as Edinburgh, but it was raining. There are two or three antique centres near the city centre, warehouses more like, mostly furniture and paintings and an astonishing array of china, Staffordshire dolls, cloisonné vases and more blue and white plates than you can poke a stick at.
Day 11: Barnard Castle in Durham. Got to press on! This town has been put on the antique map by shows such as Bargain Hunt, who come here fairly frequently, although I'm not too sure why. The antique
centre is very small and a bit disappointing, given we had detoured to get there. But it is a very picturesque town, home to the Bowes Museum and that fantastic, life-size, solid sliver, automated swan. Bowes
House is quite something too, so perhaps it isn't that disappointing a detour.
Day 13: After two days on a narrow boat with relatives on the Chesterfield canal, it's off to Hemswell, a disused RAF base in Lincolnshire east of Gainsborough on the A 631. In 1944 it was from there that
Wing Commander Guy Gibson, he of The Dambusters fame, took off on what was to be his last, fatal mission. Use your imagination and you can see his faithful black Labrador pining for him at the gates.
Hemswell claims to be the largest antiques centre in Europe, and I don't doubt it. Basically, it is five enormous centres in one, housed in the old buildings and hangars of the base; one of them, Guardroom Antiques, is actually in the original guardroom. If there is such a thing as an antiques centre everyone should visit before they die, this is it. Floor after floor, room after room of antiques and collectables. We were there for five hours and barely stopped. It's an amazing place.
Day 14: A night with friends in Nottingham before we head south, by-passing both Lincoln and Newark-on-Trent - the first a city of great historical interest and beauty, the other a town that is one of the hubs of antiques in England, with many shops and centres. Four times a year it hosts the famous Newark Antiques Fair, one of the largest in the world with over three thousand stalls. But we can't go everywhere, and neither of those places are on the agenda this trip. We're off to Stamford.
On the way we stop off in Grantham, the ancestral home of Mrs Thatcher. Even the little antique centre sells copies of her book! Melton Mowbray isn't far away, and you haven't lived until you've eaten a Melton Mowbray pork pie for lunch. Stamford is a fascinating little town, virtually every building is ancient - from mediaeval to Georgian - and it has a very good and well-run antiques centre; I bought a nice set of cards here.
Day 15: Back in Warwickshire base camp. It was meant to be a domestic day, but by lunchtime I've got itchy feet and we head for Brackley in Northamptonshire. Only an hour from Warwick, there's a large
antiques centre in a basement under a supermarket. About two hundred stands in all, mostly small items but several of the stalls are obviously run by top-of-the-range antique dealers with some lovely Georgian
furniture, writing slopes and silver. Is this a sign that the financial times are hurting antiques across the board? A few years ago, dealers in these 'pure' antiques wouldn't have been seen dead in one of these centres.
Day 16: Kidderminster, Bridgnorth, Ironbridge and Shrewsbury. The Kidderminster antiques centre has to be the smallest I've ever been to. More a shop than a centre, it took no more than five minutes to look
around; many of the sellers obviously only rent a shelf, much less a cabinet. Bridgnorth was much better. A walled and gated town, it was the northernmost outpost on the River Severn in Roman times, hence the
name. Here there are two really interesting antique centres, crammed with collectables and all at very reasonable prices. One dealer had a fantastic collection of old records, stamps, coins and banknotes.
There is a small antiques centre at Ironbridge, but the most notable thing is the bridge itself - the first ever to be made of iron. Designed by Thomas Telford, the town named after him is nearby.
Shrewsbury is yet another lovely English town, there are so many! Wonderful architecture and narrow cobbled streets, although parking is a serious problem, especially on a nice summer's day. The antique centre is in an old cellar, and is a good deal older than most of the items being sold I fancy. About a hundred dealers trade here, again mostly small collectable items but the prices aren't bad. In fact, antiques across the range seemed to be cheaper in the UK than Australia, which is peculiar because just about everything else, from bread to petrol, underpants to cars is significantly dearer.
Day 18: Back to base for a rest.
Day 19: Leominster, Brecon, Llandovery, Llandieilo, Carmarthen. Yes, we're off to Wales, a country where 'You need half a pint of phlegm in your mouth just to pronounce the place names,' as Blackadder says
so wonderfully. The Carmarthen antique flea market is a fairly new concept, concentrating as it does more on collectables than pure antiques. It's a lovely drive down the A40 and over the Brecon Beacons, although
it was raining, of course; it always rains on the Brecon Beacons! I won't repeat them again for fear or running out of phlegm, but the four towns named before Carmarthen each have very good and interesting
antique centres, and there are several antique shops in the smaller towns along the way.
Day 20: Carmarthen overnight in the Rose and Crown for £75 a night. Very nice, apart from the noise at chucking-out time; our room was right over the front door! The market is held in the showground, two
hundred and fifty stands inside and out, a bit like Wetherby only with slightly more interesting stuff. Here I had a bit of a bonanza and bought a dozen or more packs of cards, a few of them very old, I was a happy
boy! Veronica was pleased too, she found some nice 'little things' for only a few pounds. We set off back to Warwick that afternoon.
Day 21: To Tunbridge Wells, where we lived for twenty-five years, to stay three nights with friends. Here, too, a sign of the times; twenty years ago Tunbridge Wells had more than a dozen antique shops
and centres, whilst today there are only two or three shops and no centres at all.
Day 22: The feature of the trip: The Ardingly Antiques Fair, held at the South of England Showground. Nearby is Sheffield Place, where Australia first played England at cricket and where the name for the
interstate trophy comes from. The Ardingly Fair is run by the same crowd that do Newark, although it's not as big, but at one thousand five hundred stalls it still takes a good day to see it all properly. Twenty
quid each to get in may seem a bit steep, but there's a queue several hundred meters long and six people wide waiting for the gates to open at 9am. Dozens of coaches from Germany, Holland, France and Spain
fill the coach park. This, if not the mother of all antique fairs, is certainly the aunty. I have referred occasionally to the goods on sale at fairs as 'stuff', a bit derogatory you might think, but at a fair of this size no
other word really describes it. The place is just crammed with 'stuff'. Stand after stand, stall after stall of it, from eggcups to gargoyles, music boxes to Satsuma ware, sets of cutlery to glass chandeliers, old milk
churns to doll's prams. There is enough blue and white crockery to fill a swimming pool, and as for jewellery! It's almost impossible to believe there's so much of it.
Dozens of huge semi-trailers from Eastern Europe take up an area the size of a football field, full of dodgy-looking furniture made to look old, massive Chinese urns and concrete life-size animals. As for 'little things', they are everywhere you look. Even if you're not a collector or particularly interested in antiques, a visit to one of these massive fairs cannot fail to amaze you.
Days 23 and 24: Despite beginning to flag, we trawl the shops and centres around the Tunbridge Wells area. This is our old stamping ground, and the first place we go to is the Sussex town of Lewes, famous
for its anti-Catholic past and custom of burning an effigy of the Pope on Bonfire Night. They have several large and very good antique centres here, and it's a lovely little town; as is Arundel nearby, home of the Duke
of Norfolk and one of the most fascinating little antique centres in the country, housed in three floors of an antique little house on the High street. "Mind your head. Duck or Grouse!"
Day 25: Time to head back to base for a bit of a rest and check the bank balance before the long haul home. We need to get back for a holiday. Talk about antiqued out - I'm knackered!