London

Londoners are steeling themselves for the introduction of the daily £5 congestion charge on February 17, introduced by Mayor Ken Livingstone in a bid to reduce traffic and pollution in the capital. The Antiques Trade Gazette has been asking members of the trade what effect it will have on their businesses.

MAYFAIR’S only specialist in tribal art, the Gordon Reece Gallery, hold an exhibition Gabbehs: an idiosyncratic art form from February 21 to March 29.

The first furniture sale of the year at Sotheby’s Olympia (20/12% buyer’s premium) was a 272-lot gathering on January 14 which saw two-thirds of the contents change hands.

The Spring Fine Art & Antiques Fair at Olympia, which will be held in London from February 25 to March 2, has received a record amount of publicity thanks to this Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) portrait of Churchill, right.

AT a time when several categories of London picture sales are struggling to achieve selling rates of 50 or 60 per cent, marine pictures appear to be one area with a rich enough client base to ride the current global financial storms.

CHOCOLATES and roses will be bought by the ton over the days leading up to St. Valentine’s on February 14. But for those looking for a more novel way of pleasing a loved one, Grays Antique Market in Mayfair offers plenty of scope.

LONDON: PIMLICO, SW1 has long been a prime London area for antique hunting, but now it is gaining an increasingly high profile as an international centre for decorative work of all descriptions.

It’s QUESTIONABLE how much influence a piece of furniture could have upon the writer using it, but certainly when the writer in question is Graham Greene, a writer of that fame can certainly influence the fate of a piece of furniture.

AS Christie’s and Bonhams followed Sotheby’s in announcing new commission structures last week, Bonhams emerged with the most attractive terms for buyers and added a new incentive for sellers at their Bond Street rooms.

STRANGE to associate the HMV label in any way with fishing, but one of the highlights of Holt’s March 6 sale at the Duke of York’s Barracks, Chelsea, will be this rare copy of Tarpomania – the madness of fishing, written in 1908 by the industrialist and founder of His Master’s Voice, Eldridge Reeves Johnson.

FOR one day only on Sunday, February 16 the London Marriott Hotel in Grosvenor Square will be a magnet for serious collectors of antique arms and armour when The London Park Lane Arms Fair celebrates its 20th anniversary.

English glass doesn’t generally compete with Continental for price, so anyone just looking at the top results from Sotheby’s mixed-owner auction held the day before their Japanese museum dispersal might have got the erroneous impression that home-produced material had played a low-key role.

CLARION Events, organisers of the Olympia Fairs, introduce a new initiative at their Spring Olympia to further emphasise their conviction that presentation and creative stand display in a no-dateline context are the way forward.

LATEST British dealers to cross the Atlantic in search of American sales are Bond Street’s Partridge Fine Arts who, until this Saturday, January 25, hold a selling exhibition at the New York premises of art dealers Dickinson Roundell.

ORGANISERS Gay Hutson and Angela Wynn, who run the successful 20/21 British Art Fair, had fairly modest expectations when they launched their Art on paper Fair at London’s Royal College of Art four years ago but, as you will see at its fifth staging from January 30 to February 2, it has very much found a niche in the crowded London fairs scene.

High quality watches are still in demand but condition is all-important to today’s discerning collectors. At a sale devoted entirely to watches at Christie’s King Street back on November 26, this gold chronograph pocket watch, right, by Louis Audemars c.1870 took £40,000.

CHRISTIE’S have unveiled some major changes for their 20th century decorative arts policy in Europe. The auction house have closed their King Street department and are concentrating all their London activities in decorative arts at South Kensington. They also want to develop and raise the profile of this field in France with regular dedicated auctions in Paris under specialist Sonja Ganne.

LAUNCHED 18 years ago with the interior decorator in mind, a reminder that the thrice-yearly Decorative Antiques and Textiles Fair is still going strong and will be held this week in its trademark marquee in Battersea Park, London SW11 from January 14 to 19.

CURRENTLY decorators’ darlings, the distinctive and different antique dealers David Grocott and Ian Lemon, who work out of Chelsea’s Core One under the name Plinth, are taking a stand at the Spring Fine Art and Antiques Fair at London’s Olympia from February 25 to March 2.

There will be three newcomers among the 100 or so exhibitors at this year’s BADA Antiques and Fine Art Fair, which will be held at The Duke of York’s Headquarters in Chelsea’s King’s Road, London SW3 from March 19 to 25.