UK

Toys from the private collection of Sue Pearson, the UK’s leading dealer in antique and vintage teddy bears and soft toys, were offered in Newbury.

Simon MacLachlan owns and runs Piccadilly Vaults, a relative newcomer to the fine jewellery scene based in London’s Piccadilly Arcade. Founded in 2017, it is named after the wall of working bank vaults installed in the basement.

A couple of Modern British works on paper drew keen attention at a recent West Sussex auction.

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

On the evening of July 29 the antiquarian community lost one of its great champions and luminaries, Jan Ellen Finch, after a characteristically courageous and defiant battle against cancer.

Distinctive steeple cups are scarce but an Elizabethan silver example came to market at a Somerset auction house

Bid to £1500 in a Norfolk sale was a 1930 first of The Savoy Cocktail Book.

A snuff box believed to have been gifted by Lord Nelson to his personal secretary during a dinner party attended by Emma Hamilton has been sold by Paul Fraser Collectables for £45,000.

After just three weeks of trading in July at their newly opened showroom in the Grade II-listed Corn Exchange in Tunbridge Wells, dealers Chrissie and John Masters of the Design Gallery have made brisk sales to new customers for their Art Deco pieces.

Demand for anything to do with Concorde is always high but a huge ‘museum quality’ model at Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) had an extra touch.

A silver sale at Woolley & Wallis (25/12% buyer’s premium) this summer included a selection of 24 snuff boxes from the Lion collection – as published in 'British Silver Boxes 1640-1840, The Lion Collection' (2015).

Pre-1950s Mary Fedden works are stylistically different to her later still-lifes and coastal subjects

The Petersfield Antiques Fair, which was scheduled to take place in Hampshire this September, has been called off.

What was billed as ‘the finest Matchbox collection to be auctioned in recent years’ was offered at Vectis (20% buyer’s premium) in the spring.

Such is the recent appeal of dolls’ house accessories that you do not even need the ‘house’ to put them in, it seems.

A live-steam Gauge 2 Midland Railway locomotive and tender was the top lot of Tennants’ (20% buyer’s premium) Toys, Models, Collectables and Sporting Sale.

Gold wedding rings belonging to poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes have been bought by London jeweller Wartski.

After a year’s absence, Lady McAlpine’s four-day Thames Traditional Boat Festival is returning to Henley to run on Fawley Meadows from Friday to Monday, August 27-30.

Naomi Knight is back with her Sunday monthly and popular Bath Vintage & Antiques Markets with the next on August 29.

By the 1980s toy action figures were shrinking in size from GI Joe and Action Man proportions to the likes of Action Force and Star Wars.