Shopping For Art & Antiques

Hunting down antiques will be easier now that a road sign symbol has been approved by the government.

After nearly ten years of trying, LAPADA The Association of Art & Antiques Dealers has succeeded in getting the approval of the Department for Transport for a tourist symbol that can be used nationwide on brown road signs to indicate the presence of art and antique dealers in a town or village.

At the start, Ivan McQuisten of Antiques Trade Gazette, Sylvia Vetta from the Thames Valley Antiques Dealers Association (TVADA) and Malcolm Hord, who was then Chief Executive of LAPADA, all worked hard on the project while the Cotswolds Antiques Dealers Association (CADA) and Gloucester Council also mounted a campaign.

In 1998, Antiques Trade Gazette staged a competition to find a symbol to represent the art and antiques trade. A symbol was chosen by ATG readers that was put forward to the then Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, featuring a capital Mike Rhodes, an experienced designer. The design was turned down by the Department but Malcolm Hord continued a dialogue with them until his retirement in 2003 when John Newgas took up the baton.

Sarah Percy-Davis, the current Chief Executive of LAPADA, revived the project in 2005 with the new Department for Transport which eventually provided a working brief for an acceptable design. She then suggested to John Hazlewood, Head of the Department of Graphic Design of the Buckinghamshire and Chilterns University, that they should hold a competition for their students to design a new symbol. A selection of the winning designs was submitted in August 2006 to the DfT for comments and feedback.

Having heard nothing from the Department, LAPADA contacted them again in May 2007 and were told that a design had been chosen and approved for use. The image selected is of a candelabra, designed by Helena Tracey who has won the LAPADA prize for her winning design.

The approved design can now be used throughout the country with the agreement of the local highways authorities to whom all applications for its use should be made. It will take about three months for the road sign to start appearing, when you will be able to follow it to find art and antiques dealers.

"I would like to thank everyone who has worked on this project over the years and whose efforts have helped to keep the antiques sign issue alive," says Sarah Percy-Davis. "We now look forward to seeing a proliferation of the candelabra brown signs on our highways and byways over the next few years and hope that as its public recognition grows, it will increase the traffic to our members and all art and antiques dealers shops and galleries around the country. We also hope that it will provide a boost for the campaign to Save Our Small Antique Shops that has been initiated by Cadogan Tate Fine Art."

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