With the V&A’s current Dior and Quant exhibitions making even the national news, and tickets at a premium, it was good to remember that Mary Quant, and her contemporary Terence Conran, were also the subject of a much more intimate exhibition at one of our favourite venues, the Fashion and Textile Museum, tucked away […]
The Tate gallery might seem an odd place for an exhibition of a 20th Century photographer’s work, but there are two very good reasons why the current one works very well there. The first is the sheer quantity of work on show. A venue like the Photographers Gallery in Soho might be able to […]
It was all so easy when I first started collecting ‘old stuff’. For one thing, it wasn’t that old – in the late 70s and early 80s, stuff from the 50s and 60s was at most 30 years old and much of it was simply classed as secondhand, rather than collectable. Charity shops were […]
Filling that bit in between Xmas and New Year is always a challenge, but fortunately the round of family visits usually takes us close enough to London to throw up some opportunities, and with absolutely no inclination to join the orgy of retail that surrounds the post Xmas sales, we grabbed the chance to […]
When the news broke of Charles Schulz’ retirement from cartooning in 1999, followed by his death the previous year, a little bit of my childhood died with him. Admittedly, I’d not read a Peanuts cartoon for a long time, and the ubiquitous application of the Snoopy motif to anything and everything in the late […]
Having indulged ourselves in the clothing of the 1930s, the next stop on our post-Xmas whistlestop tour of current exhibitions took us up to the Euston Road and the Wellcome Collection where the galleries are always guaranteed to set you thinking and where the underlying medical theme can produce a surprisingly diverse range of […]
After a week touring south Devon, from Exeter as far down as Plymouth, it would be easy to fill an article with a blow by blow account of the antiques, vintage and collectibles shops we found and the purchases we did or didn’t make in each but, frankly, you could get the former from […]
For those of us with an abiding love of design from the mid 20th Century, it’s a swift journey from the headline items like movie posters, classic magazine adverts and record covers to the minutiae of everyday life. But even for those less obsessive, who can honestly claim that they’ve not hung onto some […]
Frankly, until very recently, if you’d talked to me about the circus, I’ve have put it firmly in that element of the vintage scene that exists only now in memories and old photos. The days of large, wild animals being carted around the country for our amusement have long gone, along with (thankfully) those […]
Occasionally, one visits a ticketed exhibition and finds oneself wondering just what you’re paying for in comparison with others that are equally interesting but free – especially when it’s in a venue where most of the exhibits are free. Well, that’s definitely not the case with the Ocean Liners: Speed and Style event at […]
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