Antique Dealers: the British Antique Trade in the 20th Century, a cultural geography

Queen Mary visiting H. Blairman & Sons Antiques, London, c.1930. Courtesy of Martin Levy, Blairman & Sons.

The ‘Antique Dealers’ project was the first time that the history of the modern antiques trade has been subject to sustained academic study. This 32 month research project started in September 2013, and was funded (£231,592) by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) one of the leading research funding bodies in the UK. The project was based at the University of Leeds, and was led by Dr Mark Westgarth as Principal Investigator (PI), with Dr Eleanor Quince, University of Southampton, as Co-Investigator (CI) and Elizabeth Jamieson, Research Fellow (RF) University of Leeds. The project sought to map, contextualize and critically analyze the antiques trade as it evolved and developed in Britain in the 20th century.

The project assessed the cultural geography of the trade in antiques in a British context, with consideration of its international dimensions and the relationships to European and North American markets.

A selection of Antique Dealer invoices. Private Collection

Using previously unexplored archives, the project investigated the evolving business practices of the trade, placing these practices into social, economic and cultural contexts and mapping these practices against the changing landscape of the broader consumption of antiques. The project assembled a large corpus of quantitative and qualitative data, with the help of crowd-source research, and mapped the changing locations of dealers and the relationships between various segments of the trade. It also aimed to map the trajectories of the antiques that passed through the trade, tracking, where possible, the current locations of those objects in public museums in the UK, Europe and North America. ‘Antique Dealers’ compiled an evolving database and interactive website with potent visualisations of key relationships between dealers, objects, and museums – see the antique dealers interactive map website.

Part of the catalyst for the project was the rapid transformation of the antiques trade over the last few years of the 20th century. The late 20th century was a turbulent time for much of the trade, with many high profile dealers retiring, or significantly modifying their trading practices. As part of the research objectives the project undertook an ethnographic study, interviewing many retired, semi-retired and working dealers. The result of these interviews form an oral history archive.

Blairman & Son Antiques, stand at Grosvenor Antiques Fair, 1950. Copyright, Blairman & Son Antiques. Courtesy of Martin Levy.

As well as these web-based and oral history archive outputs, the Antique Dealers project held a public Conference focused on the history of the antiques trade, took place on April 14th & 15th 2016 at Temple Newsam House in Leeds.