Salisbury

Walter Child (1840-1930) and Harold Child (1848-1915), the sons of an East End pawnbroker who left a fortune of £30,000, opened as art jewellers in 1880 at 1 Seville Street, Belgravia.

Antique and vintage jewellery remains a strong suit across a broad range of styles, periods and values.

This stoneware pond by Robert Wallace Martin, measuring 6ft 6in (2m) across, comprises 40 architectural elements, each incised with fish and aquatic creatures among water weeds.

A rarity at a recent Woolley & Wallis (26% buyer’s premium) ceramics and glass sale was a late 18th century Wedgwood basalt intaglio seal, featuring a profile portrait of the notorious American spy Captain Nathan Hale (1755-76) beside the reversed inscription 'My Country!!!'.

Local landscapes by brother of the prominent Modern British artist Paul are now witnessing growing demand

The auction history of this highly decorative cased pair of Spanish 22 bore convertible ‘Madrid’ lock pistols goes all the way back to 1843 - with a royal connection.

In 1962, Lord John Hope, the Minister of Works in the Macmillan government commissioned David Mellor (1930-2009) to ‘supply silver you have designed to every British embassy in the world’.

The popular dealer amassed an impressive array of items assayed in the city

The many models of anthropomorphic primates that proliferated British decorative arts in the 1860s typically reference Charles Darwin’s provocative and often lampooned 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection', first published in 1859.

In the 1920s-30s, the Scottish-born goldsmith Sybil Dunlop (1889- 1968) presided over a workshop in London’s Kensington Church Street dressed in a kaftan and Russian fur boots.

Woolley & Wallis is offering what it hails as a collection of military medals given to “one of Britain’s most distinguished soldiers of the 20th century”.

The Age of Oak sale at Woolley & Wallis (26% buyer’s premium) on April 9 was built around the collection formed by antiques dealers Bruce and Margaret Howard.

A diminutive Quaker pin cushion made to raise funds for a pioneering mental health hospital in York has sold for a remarkable sum at Woolley & Wallis.

Whatever interior statement one hopes to achieve, it is so often the furniture that really makes a room.

New Zealand-born architect Keith Murray (1892-1981) began to make designs for Wedgwood on a commercial basis in 1933, joining a stable of designers that included Daisy Makeig-Jones and John Skeaping.

With this year marking the 100th anninversary of the exhibition that gave Art Deco its name, we report on the British designers whose creations appear on the market