Shopping

Old curiosities indeed

Behind the scenes at an auction house
It’s 11.30am on the first day of Bonhams’ mammoth Savoy sale and the grand Thames Foyer is stuffed with people: a peculiar mix of suited-and-booted City types, corduroy-clad folk who look like they’ve been teleported from the Home Counties, a smattering of ordinary-looking souls and, quite randomly, a wealthy-looking woman, with a bird’s nest of grey hair, in a fluorescent ski jacket. The atmosphere is electric. ‘With me in the front,’ shouts the auctioneer, already up to Lot 51, a set of red, glazed ceramic table-lamp bases which are almost three times over the estimate price of £350. ‘£1,000 at standing,’ he says throwing a glance across the room before fixing them back on the first bidder. ‘Thank you sir. One thousand, two hundred. Going once, going twice.’ Bang! Sold.

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From London to New York, never before have auctions garnered such large and varied crowds ready to part with such huge amounts of cash. Sotheby’s, the American-owned auction house founded in London in 1744, says its auction sales for last year were $5.4 billion (£2.74 billion), a 44 per cent increase on the previous year’s sales of $3.75 billion (£1.9 billion) and the highest in the company’s history. Sotheby’s also notes the London market has grown a mighty 600 per cent since 2002 – the big new markets include Asian art, Russian art, Impressionism and contemporary art. Christie’s, founded in London in 1766 and now owned by Frenchman Francois Pinault, is experiencing equally jubilant times with art from names likes Lucian Freud and Claude Monet reaching double the estimates achieved at sales last year.

A lock of Catherine Parr's hair

Auction records, it seems, are being broken on a weekly basis. Back in May of last year Mark Rothko’s ‘White Center’ sold for £36.9m, the highest price for anything sold at auction that year. In November, Jeff Koon’s ‘Hanging Heart’ sold for £11.96m, making him the most expensive living artist, overtaking Damien Hirst, whose ‘Lullaby Spring’ sold for a mere £9.73m in June.

Despite these multi-million-pound records, auction houses are no longer the closed, dealer-oriented events they once were. Dating back to Babylon 500BC when, rather outrageously, women were sold for marriage – these days auctions provide of all sorts of other exotic items. A glance at a recent London auction list includes Bonhams’ Gentleman’s Library sale, where, among other things, a lock of hair belonging to Queen Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth wife, was sold. (However, it also sparked controversy when the Met seized endangered animal parts.) Less controversially, Hitoshi Takano, 21, an Imperial College student who has been frequenting auctions for the past couple of years in an aim to establish his very own gentleman’s library managed to get hold of a silver hip flask for £90. ‘A bargain,’ he says. ‘It’s more exciting than going to an antiques shop and you can get things for a much better price.’

Hitoshi has a point. Even the most illustrious sales provide unexpected bargains, particularly if an item doesn’t have many admirers. While the Savoy sale exceeded expectations in terms of how much money it made, there were incredible buys – a set of contemporary dining tables went for a laughably low £12 and one of the custom-made Savoir beds went for just £360, complete with headboard and all the linen.

Early twentieth-century model trains

It’s not all glamour, romance and history; auctions are also providers of the utterly ordinary from ex-authority vans to repossessed houses and reclaimed furniture. Across London, or in old scrapyards in Wandsworth to humble showrooms on the Essex Road, car dealers, landlords, antiques dealers, jewellery-sellers and savvy thrift-hunters frequent auctions at the less glamorous end of the scale. At these types of events, it is perfectly possible to get, say, a good P-reg Ford Ka for half the going rate in Autotrader, a magnificent Victorian chest (in plentiful supply and currently not in vogue) for less than £100 or a two-bedroom flat in Willesden, yours within a month for £150,000.

Those who haven’t yet experienced the thrill of auction buying could be forgiven for being a little intimidated. ‘People often think you are going to be thrown to the wolves and that nobody will be there to help you,' says Matthew Girling, chief executive for UK and Europe at Bonhams. 'But these days auction houses are much more hand-holding. In many instances we can advise on the condition of something up for sale a long way in advance. When I joined [in 1988], it was the dealers of Portobello and people who were in the business. Now it’s more half-and-half [dealers and the public]. Telephone bids are now quite normal and so are bids via the internet.’

What an auction offers over an antiques shop or second-hand showroom is what Girling simply calls the ‘theatre’. No other shopping experience beats the thrill of being in a room where you can cut the atmosphere with a – no doubt antique – knife as tensions rise and dreams are realised or thwarted with a firm rap of the gavel.

Bonham's 'Urban Art' auction is on Feb 5.