A morning at the monthly coastal auction.
One auctioneer, two hundred lots, and a small but persistent clientele who have been showing up on the second Saturday of every month for, in some cases, the past twenty-five years. A reported portrait of a quiet institution.
The saleroom is in a converted nonconformist chapel on a side street about ten minutes' walk from the harbour. The chapel was, until 1979, an active place of worship; it has, since 1982, been an auction room. The conversion was minimal: the pews were removed, a small platform was built at the front where the pulpit had been, and a long wooden counter was installed along the south wall. The rest of the building is essentially as the congregation left it. The painted text above the door — "the Lord is in his holy temple" — has not been removed. The auctioneer, when I ask him about it, tells me he likes it. It keeps the buyers, he says, slightly on their best behaviour.
The auction has been running on the second Saturday of every month, with very occasional exceptions for major bank holidays, since 1985. The current auctioneer has been running it since 2003. His predecessor, who ran it for the previous eighteen years, is — at the morning I attend — sitting in the second row of the audience, attending as a buyer.
What is on the floor
The lots, on the morning I attend, number two hundred and seventeen. They have been laid out the previous afternoon along the long counter and on a series of trestle tables down the centre of the room. Buyers are invited to view the lots between nine and ten in the morning; the sale begins, sharply, at ten.
The lots are, by the standards of contemporary auction practice, modest. There are perhaps thirty pieces of furniture — none particularly grand, most in the range of a few hundred pounds. There are perhaps eighty smaller lots of household and decorative items: china, glass, silver-plated tableware, small pictures, a few clocks, a substantial collection of brass and copper kitchen items that have been collected from a single house clearance. There are perhaps forty lots of jewellery, mostly Victorian and Edwardian, mostly modest in materials and workmanship. There are perhaps fifteen lots of books, mostly mid-twentieth-century and of moderate interest. There is, at the very back of the room, a single lot of architectural salvage — a small pair of cast-iron gates — that has been included, the auctioneer tells me, almost as a favour to the consigning family.
The remaining lots are a long tail of small objects: a tray of pocket watches in various states of repair, a box of old fountain pens, a collection of small brass instruments, several pieces of nautical hardware, a small set of antique tools. These small lots are, by the auctioneer's account, where the most interesting buying happens. The furniture sells, but predictably. The small lots are where one finds, occasionally, something unexpected.
Who is in the room
The room is, by the time the sale starts, perhaps three-quarters full. There are, I estimate, between sixty and seventy people present. They are, by my unscientific count, somewhere between the ages of thirty and eighty, with a clear concentration in their fifties and sixties. They are dressed for a Saturday morning auction in a converted chapel: comfortably, warmly, with a number of pairs of glasses balanced on the tops of heads.
The regulars, who the auctioneer points out to me discreetly between lots, are perhaps a third of the room. Several are dealers from the local trade. Two are buyers for larger London dealers who do not, themselves, attend small regional auctions but who maintain a small network of agents to attend on their behalf. One is a private collector who specialises in pre-war brass instruments and who has, over the years, bought a substantial portion of his collection at this saleroom. One — the auctioneer tells me this with a particular small smile — has been attending the second-Saturday auction since 2001 and has, in twenty-five years, bid on perhaps twelve lots and successfully bought none. He comes, the auctioneer says, for the company.
"The Saturday auction is, for some of these people, a social occasion. They come for the lots they have looked at. They stay for the lots they have not. They go for a pub lunch afterwards. It has been like this for, in some cases, twenty-five years."
How the sale runs
The auctioneer's pace is, by the standards of larger London salerooms, deliberate. Each lot is given perhaps thirty seconds of bidding time. The auctioneer announces the lot number, gives a brief description ("Lot fifty-six, the Victorian brass and oak desk set, who'll start me at eighty pounds?"), and works the room through a slow upward ladder of bids. The increments are smaller than at a London sale: five pounds at the lower end, ten or twenty in the middle range, fifty at the upper end. There is no online bidding; there is, instead, a small bank of three telephones at the side of the room operated by two of the auctioneer's staff for the use of bidders who cannot attend in person.
The hammer comes down, in most cases, at prices that are — to my non-specialist eye — modest. A small mahogany side table that I would have expected to make four to five hundred pounds in a London room makes, here, two hundred and twenty. A small Victorian brass barometer makes ninety pounds. A box lot of mixed kitchen brass makes thirty-five pounds. The pieces are not, by any measure, being sold at unrealistic prices; they are being sold at the prices that this particular room, for this particular set of buyers, has settled at over the past quarter-century.
What the sale is for
I want to be careful about what I claim here. The Saturday auction is not, in any obvious sense, a major commercial venue. The total takings, on the morning I attend, are perhaps in the region of fifteen to twenty thousand pounds. The auctioneer's commission, after costs, will be a modest fraction of that. He is not — and would, I suspect, freely admit — getting rich from the second Saturday.
What the auction does, however, is provide a regular, predictable, and trusted channel through which a particular kind of stock moves from a particular kind of seller to a particular kind of buyer. The sellers, in most cases, are local families with estates to disperse. The buyers, in most cases, are local or regional dealers who know what they are looking at and who pay fair prices. The auctioneer, sitting in the middle of this exchange, is performing a function that is, in its way, indispensable to the small antiques trade of the southeast.
This is not, I want to insist, a nostalgic argument. The Saturday auction is not running on goodwill; it is running on the actual commercial need of a small region for a venue at which stock can be moved from one set of hands to another. The need is, in 2026, smaller than it was in 1985, when the auction started. It has not, however, gone away. The second Saturday continues. The room continues to fill. The regulars continue to attend.
What I left thinking
I went for a pub lunch afterwards with three of the regulars. The conversation, predictably, was about the morning's sale: which lots had gone for less than expected, which had gone for more, which the speakers would have bid on if they had had the budget, which they had bid on and lost. The talk was, in its way, the most expert post-mortem of a regional auction I have heard. It was also, I realised slowly, an old conversation. The four of us at the pub had, by my count, perhaps eighty years of attendance at this single Saturday auction between us.
This is, in 2026, an unusual thing to be able to say about a regional commercial venue. The pub lunch will, I expect, continue on the second Saturday of every month for as long as the auction continues. The auction will, the auctioneer tells me when I see him at the end of the lunch, continue for as long as there is stock to sell. I have no reason to doubt him.