Broadening horizons

AS my car takes the winding road off the main A339 towards Donnington Priory, Siri announces my destination, ‘Dreweatts 1759’. The date is absolutely part of this well-known auction brand. Only Sotheby’s, which traces its origins back to 1744, predates it.

Dreweatts, founded by Thomas Davis, a cabinetmaker and land agent from Abingdon, Oxfordshire, is one of a sprawling regional network of auction houses —Sworders (1782), Mallams (1788), Cheffins (1825), Lyon & Turnbull (1826), Woolley & Wallis (1884)—that sprang up from the late 18th century to serve a growing appetite for this particular method of exchange. Industrial capitalism had created the need to pass stuff on, from one generation to the next, or from the debt-ridden to the newly rich. By the 20th century, there were auction houses in almost every market town, selling everything from houses to livestock to furniture and fine art. Today, a handful of names —the London duopoly Christie’s and Sotheby’s with their near-neighbours, the more generalist Bonhams and the more specialised Phillips—dominate the higher ends of the market. Meanwhile, the fortunes of the mass of regional houses has risen and fallen repeatedly as economic circumstances and peoples’ habits and tastes have changed.

In 2020, however, as a new decade opens, the situation for regional auction houses in Britain is buoyant. Their names increasingly appear in the media attached to record auction prices, rediscovered masterpieces or prestigious country-house sales. A number has carved out specialisms that