Magnets for magpies and lovers of ‘old things’, antiques shops have changed very little over the centuries. But when and where did these treasure troves first appear? We take a walk down memory lane...
FEATURE RHIANNON BATTEN
WW hat counts as antique rather than merely second-hand? An object of a certain age? An item with that prized, if slightly mystical, characteristic patina? One person qualified to answer is Dr Mark Westgarth, at the University of Leeds. An antiques dealer turned academic, specialising in the history of the antiques trade (antiquetrade.leeds.ac.uk), he says that the accepted definition of an antique is an object at least 100 years old. Established in the USA by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, the definition has since been widely adopted on both sides of the Atlantic.
A more interesting question, however, might be: what counts as an antiques shop? Westgarth dates its arrival, by contrast, to 1816, when ‘antique furniture dealer’ first appeared in the Post Office Directories. Wealthy individuals might have been collecting objects from ancient Greece and Rome since the Renaissance, and dealers in ‘curiosities’ had existed since at least the 1600s, when the European penchant for cabinets of curiosities flagged elite social status as ostentatiously as today’s super-yachts; but the antiques shop as we know it came later. Curiosity shops, as epitomised in Dickens’ serialised 1840–41 story, sold many things, but dedicated antiques shops emerged specifically when the market expanded from wealthy curiosity collectors to middle-class homeowners seeking antique furnishings.
At the same time, the Napoleonic Wars ended, and dealers began importing historical objects from Europe on a wholesale level. This continued until the 1850s, when the trade became increasingly specialised (reflecting the rise of decorative arts museums such as the South Kensington Museum, now the V&A). Before the arrival of such museums, Westgarth contends that antiques shops offered a way for the public to engage with ‘old material’. In the early 19th century, he says, people started to take a much wider interest in the kinds of things that we now associate with antiques. ‘They began
to value them as distinctive objects, over and above the personal associations people might have had with their grandparents’ belongings.’
The early antiques shops mostly stocked a range of furniture, armour, porcelain and other miscellany, and were often run by people who had moved into the trade fro
