Five-metre-high festival flags, in primary colours, flap under greying skies. The buzzy, expectant crowd range from hip twentysomethings hunting for the next trend to elderly aficionados. Well equipped for an English summer’s day, they alternate between aviator sunglasses and pac-a-macs.
Sounds like a belated report from Glastonbury? No, it’s a snapshot of the outdoor antiques events, held in muddy fields up and down the country, from Lincoln (where the flags fly) to Ardingly (renowned for its mud). As much a British institution as our music festivals, drawing stallholders from home and abroad, the open-air fairs are lately attracting a new wave of fans, avid for their rich haul of decorative antiques, from stags heads to painted dressers and station clocks.
Fair-goer numbers began to climb a couple of years ago: visitors to Newark have risen by 21 per cent since 2009, and Ardingly has attracted 28 per cent more in that period. Edward Cruttenden, who runs the Sunbury Antiques Fair at Kempton Park racecourse, reckons he knows the reason why: “I think recently vintage has really seen an upturn. With more designers talking about it and famous people buying vintage, the younger generation is becoming ever more attracted to it.”
Visitors to Kempton Park include fashion designer Alice Temperley, interiors guru Kelly Hoppen, model David Gandy and Dan Gillespie, the Feeling’s lead singer, who is furnishing his new house, a Victorian pub conversion in east London, with Kempton finds.
These large-scale markets started life as an efficient way for the antiques trade to stock up, with a vast array of wares – 3,000 and 4,000 stands at Lincoln and Newark – offered at wholesale prices. Some preserve the opening hours (6.30am starts at Kempton Park) and higher-priced first-day admission (£20 at Newark) for the professionals, but they’re now events any vintage collector, fashion student and home improver can enjoy.
The advantages to an antique-hunting day trip are clear: inspiring stands (some styled up to rival the Fulham shop windows they supply), unparalleled choice, exceptional prices.
But, if you are intending to trawl thousands of stalls in a day, says designer Kit Kemp, who is already composing her next Newark wishlist, you need a plan of campaign. “You have to be careful you don’t get carried away. It’s a good idea to go with an area in mind.”
Kit, who furnishes the super-stylish Firmdale hotels with a mixture of vintage and modern pieces, targets antiques that sit well in a contemporary interior. “I love old weathervanes and workbenches that used to hold lathes, really good, solid pieces of oak or sycamore. If you just sand them down, they look fabulous, quite sculptural.”
