Antiquing in the UK
So, the plan this time was to reverse the order of my usual trips. Rather than go someplace foreign and pick up a few antiques along the way, I decided that I would go antiquing and maybe take in some foreign stuff. Having already been to London made it an easy choice. And, of course, having a free place to stay (my cousin Sam's flat) and a free plane ticket (using my miles on Northwest) helped too.
The other factor to consider is that I really needed a vacation. I had learned from my trip to Charleston that going away on a vacation was not a guarantee that I would relax. To really get in some down time, I had to leave the country. Being in the States means that I can continue to check email and voice mail throughout the day, and frequently did so. But being in the UK basically nixed either activity. Epic and I would both have to learn to survive without the other for a week.
So, the plan was hatched: I would shop all day and then lounge around and be a couch potato during the night. I decided in advance that I would be content to simply relax and that finding good stuff would be a secondary consideration. This proved to be a good choice as my overall searches were fairly unsuccessful (a minor shame as I had saved a considerable sum of money and allotted myself a generous allowance to spend while I was there). But I did enjoy lounging on my cousin's couch immensely. I even learned a bit about rugby, caught up on the latest on fine British entertainment, and began to actually care if David Blaine would survive his glass box ordeal.
The flight across to the UK was fairly uneventful.
Business Class was packed, which
surprised me and my neighbor was more than a bit resentful that I was there on a "free" ticket
since his wife had been bounced to Coach because they had missed their flight. How this was in
any way connected with me is a mystery, but I can get in a dig here about it. Personally, I never
would have allowed only 45 minutes to make an international connection, but some people don't
think ahead I guess. That little annoyance aside, I was truly amazed to find that I slept on the
flight -- managing to get about 3-4 hours of fairly decent sleep on the flight. It put me in good
shape to hit the ground running.
The first day in the UK was a challenging day. I had
to get through customs, get a weekly
rail pass, unload my stuff at Sam's place, get changed, and get over to Camden Passage before
they closed at 2pm. Given that I did not even arrive at Gatwick until 9am, this required quite a bit
of hustle. I was lucky and the flight was actually early, customs was quick, my luggage did not
take a long time to recover, the trains were fairly regular (although I had some trouble figuring
out which local train I needed to take to Brockley), and I was at my cousin's by 10:30am.
There is an odd sense of deja vu to take the same plane and train to the same place, but do so over a year later. Some things hadn't changed. The last time, you may recall, I was able to wax eloquently about the English backyard. Much of that hadn't changed. As you can see on your right, the neighbor on the right side had perhaps gotten a bit shabier while the one on the left had cleaned up a bit, but it all pretty much looked the same. The one thing that definitely HAD changed was that I was there on my own. That meant that in general I moved lighter and faster, but I also made my own unique mistakes and errors as you'll see in the chronicle that follows.
By Noon, I was at Camden Passage. Camden Passage
is a small antique market that
operates on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
Saturday is Portobello day, so I didn't expect to be able to come here on Saturday. That made it
especially critical that I get here on Wednesday. The other reason to get to Camden Passage is
that it is the home of Jubilee Photographica (originally run by Beryl Vosberg, but now under the
ownership of Richard Meara). Jubilee is by far the best place to buy photographs in London. The
selection of stereocards is much smaller these days, but the CDVs, Cabinet Cards, and Ambros
and Dags are great. I was cautious my first visit and did not spend much, but I would return and
give more considerable attention once I realized how special Richard's collection was.
Just down the passageway from Jubilee, there is a small arcade called "Gazebo" which has a stall with an elderly woman selling photographs and photo postcards. Not as impressive as Jubilee, but as I would discover later (even if I did not appreciate it on my first day), finding two decent places to buy photos would be a rarity.
The rest of Camden Passage is a collection of shops,
arcades, and a few open indoor malls
(with temporary tables). There are also outdoor merchants (although at this cold time of year not
as much as there probably are in the summer). The place is not large, but there were easily a
couple hundred merchants to shop from and the specialties ran the full gamut.
I stayed until 2 or so and then was pretty much done. I was also pretty tired and while I considered trying a few shops, I decided in the end to just go back to Sam's and relax. I hadn't bothered to get lunch (a chronic problem when I'm shopping) so I picked up an ice cream and once I got home, I lounged on the couch and fell asleep until Sam and Kjetil got home.
That night we got Indian take away and we watched an outrageously funny reality show called "Michael Portillo as a Single Mum" in which the notorious Tory shadow minister of finance got to spend a week taking care of four children and holding down two jobs (a wonderful TV concept for America to think about importing -- much more cruel than Survivor). I also got up to speed on David Blaine's attempt to find decent housing in the London Bridge area. I went to sleep at a fairly decent hour, managing to sleep OK. My plan was to allow myself a little bit of sleep in, but still try to hit the road early because I had a lot of mileage in mind.
Getting up at a decent hour on my first full day in the
UK took a certain amount of self-discipline and devotion, but I wanted to make the most of the
trip and at this point I was still convinced that there was an unlimited amount of photos out there
for me to uncover. So, I got up pretty early (around 8am or so) considering that I was still pretty
jet lagged.
The day's plan was ambitious: go down to the Merton Abbey Mills (located way south in Morden) and then up the Greenwich Market. Morden is end of the line and so my Weekly 1-2 pass wasn't going to cut it. Explaining to the station master what I wanted proved to be difficult since I was a tourist with a language barrier, so I ended up buying a whole new daily 1-2-3 pass just to get down to Morden. Having now spent 6.20 just to get down there, I was committed to getting my money's worth.
Boy! Was I disappointed. It was my first introduction
to the difficulty I was going to
encounter shopping in the UK. An hour ride and hike later, I found the place and a whopping
total of ten junk merchants. I suppose there might have been something interesting (if you were
into collecting shaving mirrors or old lighters), but definitely nothing photographic. Within 5
minutes, I was dejectedly heading back to the Underground and reflecting on a wasted morning
(and wasted money). So, definitely don't waste your time on Merton Abbey Mills. Maybe in the
summer it is more interesting (the place looks like it can expand) but in the late Fall it just plain
sucked.
My next stop (about an hour away) was Greenwich
Market -- which I had
visited the previous year on a Sunday (which was the Crafts day). The place was quite a bit
scaled down from its weekend springtime business, but still
had a good selection of stalls. More to the point, I found my first (and only) dedicated postcard
merchant. The selection was smallish but they had a sufficiently interesting collection of "Social
History" cards for me to peruse. I also dropped by a shop outside of the mall that specializes in
maritime antiques and that I had been to the previous year and found some stereocards at.
Unfortunately, their stock had remained unchanged.
Having accomplished my mission for the day, it was
time to strategize about what to do with
my afternoon. And also to try getting some lunch. The fish and chips had some temptation but I
wimped out on the greasiness and settled on a cheap Chinese place frequented by lots of students.
The servings were unbelievably large and I ate cheap.
For my afternoon, I decided to head out to Alfies --
my first attempt at a Antique Mall instead
of a weekly market. Going there took me clear across London to Marylebone -- an area of town
that was an odd cross between business hotels and public projects (not an area I would choose to
be at night). Alfies is surrounded by several antique shops that are obviously hoping to benefit
from Alfie's foot traffic. Overall, Alfies is big on jewelry and glassware, but there is one stall with
lots of photographs, postcards, and other paper items. Run usually by a couple, on the day I came
by, an elderly Jamaican gentleman was staffing it. He proved to be quite enjoyable to talk with
and pleasant, although not terribly knowledgeable. That said, I bought quite a lot from him that
day.
Food options in the area are a bit eclectic. Across the street from Alfies, there is a Lebanese bakery with an unusual special. The sign advertises an "American Breakfast" complete with 2 sausages, 2 eggs, beans, and a tomato with toast (yes, I know that I always eat beans for breakfast in the States, don't you?)!
I did not try the beans, but we did do an old favorite: Live Bait -- which Sam and Kjetil had introduced Jenn and I to the last time we were there. And again I split their huge selection of raw stuff with Kjetil -- a huge assortment of oysters, mussels, shrimp, snails, and so on. Given my newly developed allergy to shellfish, I fortified myself in advance with Imodium and survived it unscathed. It was everything I remembered it to be.
There are many legends about the Bermondsey market. It is supposed to be a great place to go very very early with a flashlight. It is supposed to be the place where the dealers go to get their special bargains. But the glory days of this market are long past. It was "discovered" by the masses long ago and any bargains have long since disappeared.
Getting there is still quite an adventure. You go to
London Bridge and then take quite a hike
through a not so nice area of town. How "not so nice"? Well, passing by the string of guys who
were urinating on the wall right out in the open is a good way to describe how "not so nice" this
area is.
Once there, I found one photo merchant with some pretty high prices and not much else to speak of. Mostly junk. There is lots of it though -- a full outdoor market and two indoor markets with plenty of stalls to explore. But it was all basically flea market quality junk. Any dealer caught buying here would basically be getting ripped off. I certainly felt like I had been, for spending the time to come out.
So, exit stage left. Walk back to London Bridge and
head for an entirely different part of the
world - the Antiquarius shop in the Chelsea district. Now, just how different is Chelsea? Let's
just say that this is a place that looks like even the dogs aren't allowed to urinate in public!
After a few wrong turns and an ambush from some Greenpeace beggars (a pretty young woman who "really wanted to talk" with me about how I could help influence Parliament to save the latest endangered species), I got there. Antiquarius is one of those places where not only is everything in a glass case, but everything is under armed guard. Basically, the Harrods of antique shops. And basically a waste of my time. I couldn't afford anything they were selling and nothing they were selling interested me anyway. Great place for 300 year old Islamic art. Lousy place for photos and postcards.
Having now probably walked a couple of miles between
Bermondsey and getting lost on my way to Antiquarius, I decided for some strange reason, that I
could just walk over to the Old
Crowther Market. Perhaps the reason for this was that I hadn't done a lot of walking lately, or
perhaps it was because I didn't realize just how not-to-scale my map was, but I embarked on a trip
of several more miles.
Worse still, there was nothing there. The Old Crowther Market, if it once existed, was no more. Probably a victim of eBay.
I decided lunch might be a good idea and stopped at a McDonalds. I also stopped at the McDonalds because of the need for a bathroom break. [One of the truly annoying things about antiquing in England is that no one wants to make the facilities available to paying customers. Instead, you are somehow expected to avoid the call of nature all day long] Anyway, I not only regretted the food choice, I regretted the bathroom choice as well. Living in Moscow Russia had taught me that the cleanest bathrooms in the world are located in a McDonalds restaurant. Apparently, McDonalds UK has not gotten the memo. The McDonalds on North End Road had the single most disgusting bathroom I have been in in my life (and mind you I have been to some pretty disgusting places).
My next stop was the Lillie Road area. Here, I really did not know what to expect as the guides had been a bit cryptic. So, let me spell it out for you: no photos or postcards. Lots of small shops selling mostly furniture. Great place to go to (by car) if you want to decorate your home with something neat. Lousy place to go on foot if you want to buy stuff that you can carry home on an airplane.
By the time I limped home, I was nearly lame from all of the walking. Trace it out on a map of London if you wish. In the afternoon alone, I hiked from Sloane Square to Fulham Broadway to West Bromptom.
Thankfully, we ate in that evening and watched TV instead of going out. Sam had spent the day slumming it as a postal clerk to make up for the lost manpower from a postal strike and Kjetil was fighting the onslaught of a cold. We were not an exciting bunch to hang out with.
So, if you're detecting a trend here about a lot of cruddy antiquing, then you can at least appreciate the trouble I was having with my week. I had budgeted myself an allowance of 200 pounds a day to spend on photos and had not come anywhere close to spending that sort of money. It looked seriously like I would be returning home with lots of spare cash and a near empty suitcase. So, I placed my hopes on Portobello.
Portobello Road
(in addition to being the title of a catchy Cat Stevens song) bills itself as the
largest antique market in the world. Is it? Well, it is big and it's probably the biggest thing in the
UK, but compared to some of the big shows in the US, it really isn't that large. We're talking
about a dozen malls, a couple dozen shops, maybe 400 merchants selling altogether.
Now buried on the left side of the right aisle of the Good Fairy mall, there's a guy who sells old cameras and stereocards. He has two cases of them but only has one out at a time (so you have to ask him to see the other). Most of the stuff is landscapes and the quality is nothing fantastic, but at least the guy has stuff! After Jubilee, this was my best find of the trip.
There's a guy who sells postcards at Pedigree
Collectables, but he doesn't do any "social history" and there are a couple photo sellers (mostly
doing cameras but they also have CDVs and cabinet cards) in The Red Lion.
But otherwise, nothing at all. A couple hundred sellers, but mostly zip.
Oh yes, lots of crowds and only one pay toilet for the masses (the wait was almost a half hour to use it).
So, now thoroughly depressed and realizing that I needed to start getting very aggressive if I was going to use up my money, I went back to Camden Passage. After all, Portobello hadn't taken more than a few hours to exhaust and the afternoon was still young.
Camden Passage on Saturday actually improves slightly on Saturday. There are more merchants and I found one selling photos who hadn't been there on Wednesday in the northern stalls. Also, now that I had money to burn I went back to Jubilee and bought more cards, photos, and even splurged on two cased images.
Sunday was an interesting day for an entirely different reason. As I headed up to Camden Lock and the antique offerings of The Stables, our train came to a halt at the Angel station. We stayed there for a long time and then the conductor announced that the line was shutting down because of an accident. The Northern Line had suffered a derailment.
Now is probably a good time to relate the sorry state of the London Underground. Since a lot of my week consisted of traveling on London's mass transit system, I feel especially entitled to evaluate it. And like the natives, I condemn it. During the time I was there, just about every day there was a significant disruption on one or more of the Underground lines in central London.
So, anyway, I was now stuck in the middle of
nowhere (i.e., at a station without any transfer
available) and had to immediately become an expert on above ground transport - a great challenge
since the transit maps for busses were apparently designed for someone intimately familiar with
London's streets (which would probably not be the person who needed a map of where the bus
went) - no landmarks, no locations, but, thankfully, an indicator of Underground stations. So, all
I needed was a bus that would take me to the Camden Town station.
The real problem of course was that just about everyone else needed to get to the Camden Town station, so the bus I needed to take was absolutely stuffed to the gills.
In the end, I did manage to reach Camden Town and
Camden Lock in particular, but finding
the place was a bit anticlimactic. Camden Town is a trendy little section of London, popular with
young people and the type of place to pick up cool CDs, leather collars, and other stuff you
wouldn't want to show to your parents. Camden Lock is just one of the many arcades in Camden
Town. And The Stables are a very small and out-of-place collection of about 25 antique sellers in
Camden Lock - located in (you guessed it!) a converted horse stable.
The only photos I found were from one merchant who had random piles of postcards, photos, stereocards, and snapshots in a messy pile on the floor. I spent about 20 quid total. And then I had to face the adventure of getting back home now that the Northern Line had been shut down.
My next planned stop was the Adams Antique Fair at
the Royal Horticultural Hall. I hadn't
really planned on going there but given that I hadn't accomplished much in the morning, it seemed
that I would have time. The site was not terribly conveniently located and combined with having
to take buses and the Underground to reach the place - basically down near Westminster - it was a
bit of a haul.
The fair was your typical antique fair - not likely to be a good place for photos, but there was one photograph merchant there, a few odds and ends lying about, and a woman selling two family photo albums - which I was able to cannibalize for a good haul of photos. Compared to everything else I had done, this wasn't that bad.
After that, I returned home to spend some quality time with my cousin and we rushed out to see a Ewan MacGregor comedy, "Down With Love" which proved mostly that Ewan is still sexy (says my cous) and that "Moulin Rouge" was not a fluke and that "Star Wars" was.
Monday at Covent Garden. The last of the major
Antique shows of the week. Again, not much to speak of. I found a postcard merchant with an
excellent collection but he wasn't selling any social history images, a
photo merchant (but she didn't have a large stock), and a bunch of folks I had seen
elsewhere during the past week. I guess I had pretty much exhausted the London antique scene
after all of these days. I did pick up a nice cased image (an ambrotype, although the seller seemed
to think it was a dag) and talked with a few other collectors who seemed pretty interested in
finding out what I might want to buy from them (although they unfortunately did not have
anything with them).
There are two markets at Covent Garden. The Jubilee Market (which is where I did all my browsing) which had about 50 dealers, and the Apple Market which seemed much smaller and did not have anything I could find of interest (mostly crafts, if I recall correctly). Even if you browse slowly, you wouldn't need more than an hor or two to exhaust the whole place. The surrounding shops are all modern stuff so there isn't a lot of peripheral shopping to be had.
This left me with one last place to check out: Grays.
Grays turned out to be another fancy
place (like Antiquarius) complete with a pretty spring running through the inside of the store,
crossed by cute little foot bridges. So, the place was fancy and sold fancy stuff. That basically
meant that there wasn't anything there for a photo collector. There are also two sections of
Grays. I went into the back area, but in the front things get even fancier and the presence of a
doorman basically clued me in that it wasn't going to have much in my price range.
So, having done most of the places that I had hoped to hit in London during my week there, I now could focus on shopping for others. I hadn't brought any sort of present for cousin, which seemed a bit rude considering that at the very least I had saved a bundle on hotels by being able to crash on their futon. And I knew the perfect gift. Having ironed my clothes each morning (I know how to pack very compactly but not how to pack without wrinkling my clothes), I had noticed the perilous state of their clothes iron. A very perfect gift. So, I went shopping and found just the right thing. At least some shopping in the UK can be easy and fruitful.
At this point, I was also trying to find a good present for my girlfriend, but not having much luck, so I decided to go back to the best of the malls, namely Alfies. In theory, this was a good idea since Alfies has by far the widest selection (from high end to low end). The problem though was much more fundamental -- they are closed on Mondays. And I didn't remember this little fact until I had gotten all the way there. So, it was back home nearly empty handed.
But having been emboldened by my success at buying small appliances, I knew that I also needed to pick up some necessities for the trip home, so I went to Sainsbury's and bought beer. My focus was on picking up some cheap domestic brews, but I did wander into the imports justto see what there was. There were some pretty nifty looking Belgian brews there but the States were represented by only two samples: Budweiser and Sam Adams. I can understand the Budweiser (after all, it is the "king of beers" right?), but why a brew named after a man who kicked British butt two hundred years ago? But why ask why? I also got some candy.
Having now exhausted all the shops, fairs, malls, and anything else antique that London had to offer, I spent my last day picking up odds and ends. I continued my shopping for gifts. I took one last whirl around town.
I started at Alfies, dropped in at Picadilly Circus, went out to Greenwich, and then ended up at Portobello Road -- which was much more sedate on a non-shopping day although most of the shops were closed.
And that evening we went out for dinner at an interesting restaurant serving Continental fusion cuisine, which is my best attempt to describe the unusual mix of light modern cooking with the root-vegetables and sauces of Old European cooking. Just a definitely strange and unusual restaurant.
Now, in all this account of my shopping adventures, I
did forget to mention that my cousin had decided to get herself hitched up just a week or two
prior to my arrival. One of the interesting facts that I learned about the UK is that on a marriage
certificate (see right), a previously unmarried man is called a "bachelor" but a previously
unmarried woman is a "spinster." So, I guess Kjetil managed to save my poor unwanted cousin
from a cursed life as a spinster. Not sure how it made any difference, but there you have it. (I
keep hoping that maybe "spinster" has a better connotation in English than it does in American,
but I suspect it doesn't.
And I finally got
a picture of Sam and Kjetil after all these years. I suspect that the only reason I managed to get
these snapshots is because of the pictures I could have put up here instead ("blackmail" is such a
dirty word, I prefer "persuasive evidence"). So, take your pick. On the left we have a charming
picture of them with Kjetil looking suspiciously like he's plotting something. On the right, we
have the more lovey-dovey pic. After all, she's no longer a spinster, right?
My flight didn't leave until Noon, but that basically meant I got to sleep in. Certainly not enough time to do anything really interesting with the day. I rolled out of bed, finished packing my bags, caught a train to Gatwick, checked in in record time, spent my spare change at the Duty Free (on candy as usual), and then lounged at the WorldClub until departure. My neighbor on the return was a quiet sort and I watched "Pirates of the Carribean" twice. In general, an uneventful return home from what was, in all respects, a fairly low key vacation.
So, what can I say about the trip in the end?
Well, next time I try to do this, I'll make sure to be in London for the PhotoFair or the Bloomsbury Fair. The UK is not so different from the US: You can't find much in the malls or shops. The real finds are at the shows. I am still glad to have done it though because I now know which shops are worth checking and which ones I should skip. I also learned that one should probably wear a nappy when you go antiquing in London since no one believes in providing public facilities. Just in case you're curious: you won't find public facilities at all in Camden Passage, Covent Garden, Greenwich Market, or Bermondsey. Portobello provides one loo for the thousands of visitors who descend on Saturday. Your best bet is the Underground and the Antique Shops (Grays and Alfies provide free water closets).
The trip was interesting as well for two other reasons: the last time I had stayed with my cousin was right before Jenn moved out and so there were plenty of memories of those last days when I first got there. By the time I left, however, I had created new memories.