Cheshire

As the Depression took hold, the clamour for luxury goods in tropical hardwoods, silver and shagreen was replaced by a demand for less expensive consumer goods that combined the modern aesthetic with new materials and industrial production.

The latest Chester Decorative, Antiques & Art Fair will be the seventh for Cooper Fairs since the event was taken over from Penman Fairs in 2019.

Event originally put on hold will be restaged from next summer – but the one-dayer will also remain

Pictured here are two lots of seat furniture that impressed bidders in recent auctions in Gloucestershire and Cheshire.

A football medal sold at a Cheshire auction house was so early in date that it was only the 13th time the FA Cup final had been contested, the game was played at Kennington Oval and the opposition was a Scottish team.

The Cheshire showground event run by Arthur Swallow includes plenty of conversation starters.

This medieval document with a royal seal attached amounts to a pardon granted by Henry IV (1367-1413) to John Barlawe of the manor of Barlow in Chorlton-Cum-Hardy (now suburban Manchester).

When the (Louis) Marx toy company produced a friction-drive model Batmobile in the 1960s the plastic car that resulted was really a model of the 1951 General Motors Le Sabre concept show car designed by Harley Earl.

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

“All things considered, it’s been a pretty good year and we have high hopes of 2023 being a cracker”, enthused Richard Burgoin, director of Arthur Swallow Fairs as he looked back at its fairs and markets in 2022.

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

Over the course of 35 years Andy Houldsworth amassed one of the largest collections of Action Man and similar action figures in the UK.

Although the box to this bronze medal is dated 1873 (leading the auction house to conclude it was Victorian), the piece itself was struck in 1760.

The sale at The Auction Centre (20% buyer’s premium) in Runcorn, Cheshire, on September 30 included this rare George III Scottish silver member’s badge for The Edinburgh Skating Club – the world’s first figure skating organisation.