Antiques Centres

Tony Wittridge is so smitten with the antiques business he is opening in the grounds of Kyre Park, a large country estate at Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire, that he is planning a move to the county from Essex.

Dorking Antiques was launched last August by three dealers: Mark Holden, Eddie Hawkins and David Whalley.

After three lockdowns but also a successful auction launch last August in between closures, Graham Hessell will be throwing open the doors once again to his Melford Antiques, Interiors & Lifestyle Centre on April 12.

Vincent Page, owner of Antiques on High in Oxford and Sidmouth, has turned his sights northwards.

“Due to our digital presence with our website, social media and the live virtual shopping tours I have been conducting all over the world my skeleton team of 10 staff have been kept extremely busy.”

Adrian Gilmour, co-owner of the Hungerford Arcade, is thrilled at news that non-essential retail can reopen in April.

A jewellery dealer for 28 years, Jane Finnegan owns Durham House Antiques in Stow-on-the Wold, an antiques centre which she bought two years ago.

A summer boom sent property prices soaring by up to 20% in some rural areas of Norfolk as buyers moved out of commuter-land to what is described in estate agent-speak as ‘lifestyle-sustainable’. We talk to four antiques business in the county.

Firms in tier 1 enjoyed good trading in December but are now back in lockdown.

Two businesses from the West Country tell us how trade was going before the latest coronavirus restrictions

Julian Tatham-Losh, who owns Top Banana Antiques in Tetbury, reports that business is booming.

Martin Webster is the e-commerce manager for the Scottish Antique and Arts Centre in Abernyte, Perthshire.

Natalie Smith opened the 30-cabinet Woodbridge Antiques Centre in 2007 and 13 years later she has been enjoying further success at a challenging time through internet sales.

Teresa Potts and her husband Jamie, a fisherman, have recently received planning permission to turn a former Red Cross training centre in the Suffolk riverside town of Woodbridge into an antiques centre.

Focus on how one antiques centre survived and now thrives by being prepared to adapt

The timing could have been a disaster, but three dealers who opened an antiques centre in Dorking at the beginning of the month have been rewarded for their ambition by a very encouraging start.

Nathan Alexander is a busy man. He has opened three antiques centres in three years with two in Southampton and a third in Fareham, all under the same title of Robin’s Nest Emporium.

The planned reopening at Easter of the former antiques warehouse in the Suffolk village of Long Melford was one of the last features to appear in this column prior to lockdown.

Stephanie Castell, owner of The Secondhand Warehouse in the Herefordshire town of Leominster, resorted to an extreme measure to make social distancing easier when the centre reopened: she took a wall out.