64 
House & Garden 
HUNTING CURIOS in PROVINCIAL ENGLAND 
Suggested Itineraries for the Lover of Antiques 
Who is Going Abroad 
SIR JAMES YOXALL 
M any an American who haunts the 
antique dealers and the auction 
sales at home has come to me, on 
arriving in London, for a little advice as 
of one collector to another. Where, they 
want to know, can a few good things best 
be picked up which are old enough, or in¬ 
expensive enough, to escape the attention 
of the American customs. For such of 
you as are coming over to tour provincial 
England this summer I offer the following 
notes: 
Chester is the cathedral city most taken 
en route from Liverpool to London, I 
think; often in the reputable Chester shops 
I have seen Americans buying delightful 
old articles for reasonable prices. But 
snares are laid there—for example, imi¬ 
tation “old Chelsea” china, fruit-baskets, 
hardly yet quite cool from the kiln; it is 
wise to beware of anything purporting to 
be old of which there are several in stock. 
All the same, near the junction of the 
street from the railway station with the 
main road that runs up towards the cathe¬ 
dral, and in the street at right angles to 
that which descends towards the river, you 
can pleasantly hunt for real curios, with 
success. And on the “second floor”, so to 
speak, of the Rows, you can find the right 
thing cheaply, in small dark shops which 
make little pretension and do not even bid 
for your custom; I bought an “old Derby” 
teapot, Japan pattern, for less than two 
dollars there. 
About two hours distant from Chester 
is Shrewsbury, a town not so picturesque 
but at least as hopeful a place to hunt in; 
as you emerge from the railway station, take 
the left, pursue the curving main street up 
hill, along the flat, and then down hill, 
turning aside into courts and bye-streets, 
alleys and little squares. You hardly go 
a hundred yards without coming upon 
another shop of the sort you seek for, 
wherein-—particularly if you rummage 
about yourself inside—you are likely to 
find, at your price, a curio you like. 
Quite considerable bargains can be had. 
Out of the chief dealer’s shop I bought a 
Chippendale period, fret-carved, butler’s 
tray table, exquisite, perfect, and antique, 
for forty dollars—a sixth of the London 
price. 
I f you land at Southampton, there and 
at Winchester, en route for London, 
you may hunt with success. Winches¬ 
ter, like almost every Cathedral city in 
England, large or small, be it York or 
Lichfield—Ely is an exception—you will 
find to harbor, in quaint little shops, 
which often have to be hunted for them¬ 
selves, treasures such as you covet and need 
not be a Croesus to buy. In such cities the 
shops have a way of clustering near the 
cathedral, and of lining the street which 
leads to it—as they do at Canterbury and 
at Lincoln, for example—and as you hunt 
you hear the chant and the organ, or the 
sound of mellow bells in the air. At Win¬ 
chester you should search the region be¬ 
tween the cathedral and the College—the 
famous old school which has sent forth so 
many great men. 
Plymouth, to pilgrims who land there, 
offers opportunities for collecting, and on 
the way to London lies Exeter, where in 
the streets near the cathedral delightful 
things may be acquired. In a ramshackle 
auction room at Exeter I bought two wine¬ 
glasses for six dollars and for one-fifty 
respectively; the first, inscribed and en¬ 
graved with the diamond, and showing a 
warship in full sail, is a “privateersman” 
glass, a kind much sought for, and costly 
to buy in the ordinary way; the other is 
one of the earliest glasses made in En¬ 
gland, Venetian in stvle and earlv 17th 
Century in date, so excessively rare that 
what its Bond Street price might be I 
really cannot say, but I declined a brother- 
collector’s pleading offer of fifty dollars. 
Even a short automobile run in En¬ 
gland will give you a hundred shops to 
enter. Suppose you aim at Oxford and 
Stratford-on-Avon; between those two, if 
you motor, spreads the Cotswold region 
of almost unspoiled old beauty. Univer¬ 
sity cities are not the best for our purpose; 
too many persons of refinement live there 
for a treasure to lie long unbought. But 
in Oxford you may search between the 
railway station and Carfax, between Car- 
fax and the cattle market, near the Mar¬ 
tyrs’ Memorial, and down that street of 
palaces called “the High”. Let us take 
the roving wheel however, and away by 
country roads twenty miles or so to Fair- 
ford (where every window in the church 
is glorious with almost incomparable 
painted glass); two shops of the kind we 
seek for are near. Seven miles on lies 
Cirencester—Roman, and 16th and 18th 
Century—where there are three or four 
shops; in one of them I bought a draw¬ 
ing-room spinning-wheel for twelve dol¬ 
lars, and in another a large oval medallion 
of 17th Century stained glass, to hang in 
or lead into a hall window, for thirteen. 
A few miles northwest lies Burford, an 
old coaching town where few of the houses 
are younger than the 18th Century, and 
most of them are two and three centuries 
older; this is a place which, I fancy, few 
Americans know. Halfway down the pic¬ 
turesque descent of the chief street there 
is a shop from which I have rejoicingly 
carried away several curio bargains, 
though it is more a place for old furni¬ 
ture than anything else. On through the 
beautiful open hill country we go to Stow- 
on-the-Wold where, on the signboard of 
our kind of shop, you may read the name 
of “Jacques”, lingering on out of As You 
Like It and the Forest of Arden, and that 
name is found again, in the same business, 
at Broadway—Mary Anderson’s village— 
quite near. Six miles more, and we come 
to Chipping Campden, a place for an¬ 
tiques and itself in this respect, the most 
delightful little town in England—almost 
perfectly antique. Then a dozen miles 
will bring us into Stratford, past the inn 
where Washington Irving took his ease. 
The streets which lead from the birth¬ 
place to the tomb take the form of the 
letter Z; along that zigzag lie shops of the 
kind we are looking for; as they do in 
Warwick, a few miles off, and at Leam¬ 
ington, a proper hunting-place, quite near. 
Thence to Worcester, Gloucester, and 
Cheltenham is the return route I recom¬ 
mend. The north transept of Worcester 
Cathedral points to an old street which 
twists along between a dozen places of the 
kind we look for till it reaches the house 
which Charles the Second occupied awhile; 
in that street I bought for seven dollars a 
Toby jug of age and authenticity—nowa¬ 
days a rare find, cheap. From the Fore¬ 
gate, too, down to the Severn bridge, is 
good hunting-ground at Worcester. Near 
the cathedral at Gloucester there are sev¬ 
eral streets to search, and Cheltenham is 
quite a place for the Tom Tiddler. 
I looked into a small jeweler’s shop 
window at Cheltenham; there were shelves 
in it heaped with miscellaneous things, 
labeled “all these at $1”—“all these at $2” 
—and so on. Lying half-hidden by plated 
spoons, fish knives, and so forth, I spied 
what seemed to me to be a parcel-gilt sil¬ 
ver handle, embossed; and sure enough, I 
took away, from the dollar-shelf, a 16th 
Century court dagger, the blade damas¬ 
cened in armorials, the handle of silver, 
parcel-gilt, and the knob the Lion of Bra¬ 
bant—such a deadly plaything as might 
have been worn at Brussels by some- 
Flemish courtier of Charles V. “I got it 
in pawn, sir” the shopkeeper explained; 
it is more valued and in safer keeping now. 
T here is hardly a large or largish 
village in England wherein, upon 
inquiry at the inn or from the local 
policeman or postman, you may not find 
some “little man”, with a lock-up shed in 
which he “keeps a few odd things”, as he 
says, that are worth looking over. In such 
a shed at a Cotswold village, for example, 
I bought two large old cooking ladles, fine 
brass, with copper rivets and the long slot 
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