West Midlands

Shrewsbury auctioneers Halls will have a new format for their weekly sales in the new year.

Staffordshire auctioneers Cuttlestones have announced that they will not be selling any lots consigned by troubled West Midlands auctioneers Walker Barnett & Hill until further notice.

Cheshire fairs organiser Patricia Hier is to sell her company Specialist Glass Fairs to Cambridge-based Paul Bishop of Oxbridge Fairs.

The University of Wolverhampton have announced they will launch a new two-year Foundation Degree in Auctioneering and Valuation in February 2009.

Quarterly sales of modestly-priced art and antiques, which were introduced for the first time this year by leading Shropshire auction house Halls, are to become a regular fixture in the company’s sales calendar.

Trading Standards say they have received a number of complaints from unpaid consignors in the wake of the fine art sale held by Walker Barnett & Hill in June.

Bonhams are to sell the contents of Great Brampton House, Herefordshire, home to the antiques business of long-standing dealer Lady Pidgeon. The sale will take place on October 1 onsite in the grounds of the estate and will feature over 700 lots of furniture, works of art, Asian ceramics and paintings.

This walnut table by the English architect-designer Edward William Godwin (1833-86), was spotted by Jeremy Lamond from Shrewsbury-based Halls during a routine valuation visit to a house in the Welshpool area.

Born and bred in the environs of Birmingham, Sheila Hughes (1937-2006) first began collecting tiles in the early 1970s.

Fellows & Sons, the Birmingham-based auctioneers and valuers, are to expand their operation to London and have appointed Richard Slater to spearhead the initiative.

£10,000 reward put up as police reveal that painting could hold the key to unsolved mystery

Provincial auctioneer’s novel twist for breaking into the American market

As of September 1, the Penkridge Salerooms come under new ownership.

After more than 50 years in the business, Worcestershire auctioneer Philip Laney is to close his firm and take up a consultancy post with chartered surveyors and land agents Doorbars.

In celebration of Fellows & Sons’ 130th anniversary, students and practising goldsmiths were invited by the Birmingham-based auctioneers to submit a design for a piece of utilitarian silver.

THE winter Antiques For Everyone fair at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre has been brought forward a month to November 1 to 4 from November 29 to December 2.

Halls auctioneer Jeremy Lamond expected the relaunch of his Shrewsbury saleroom to be the biggest challenge of the month. But a small box of antiques consigned for sale soon changed that.

Charterhouse Auctioneers and Valuers have expanded their operations in Sherborne with the addition of an extra saleroom, and new heating and air conditioning in their main saleroom.

DMG Antiques Fairs have sold the two Malvern fairs as part of their widespread revamp.

THIS year was the second successful three-day Ceramics Festival held at Stoke-on-Trent in October, which is maybe surprising for a place which owes its very existence to pottery and is regarded by many, most particularly Paul Atterbury, the festival patron, as “the ceramics centre of the Western world”.