The Antiques Directory

This general gateway website covers a very wide field, which contributes both to its usefulness and, inevitably, to its limitations. Watch out when you're clicking on the links; though you are clicking through to a new page each time, you may not realise it because the upper half of each page remains the same. You need to scroll down to see the new information.

SPECIAL FEATURES

This is a clear and well designed website, offering a multiplicity of links. Auctions & Auctioneers offers a list of counties, though clicking on two, Durham and North Yorkshire, produced no results, which suggests the information is somewhat biased in favour of the south of England. Books about Antiques brings up a limited list, where clicking on the pictures of the book covers (which eventually load to the left of your screen) transports you direct to Amazon. Fairs & Shows again produces none in Durham or North Yorkshire. Antiques Magazines leads to a less than impressive list, downmarket by comparison with the list at Antiques World and was aimed more at collectables than antiques.

Information is a somewhat impenetrable title, and leads to a list of collecting categories with everything from Advertising Signs to Vintage Luggage. Pursuing these links may, disappointingly, lead to purveyors of reproductions rather than the real thing. Certainly this was the case when tested with 'Sculpture'. Incidentally, these links are only available online, so that clicking rapidly simply to open them, in the hope of being able to re-visit them offline at a later time, doesn't work. The same problem with offline return visits applies to Miscellaneous, where categories include Carriage & Shipping, Currency Conversion, Restorers & Restoration (only one listed), Travel and Tourism (only two, and one of those is a restorer of antique luggage who presumably got into the wrong index) and Media, which is carefully subtitled 'Newspapers, Radio & TV'.

This last has a useful link to Historic Newspapers at www.classicengland.co.uk. Webmaster Resources, also under the Miscellaneous link, reveals the problem with this website, and that is that contributors select their own locations for listing within the site. This presumably explains why another restorer appears under Directories but not under Restorers & Restoration.

Shops & Shopping is again limited in scope, with only one small business listed in York, for example, where of course many more could (and to make the website really useful, should) be listed. Again, the site is dependent on those shop owners who contribute their own information, and the result is inevitably patchy even though inclusion in the lists is free. Video's (sic) about Antiques looks promising but the link to one that appeared to be about Charles Rennie Mackintosh drew a blank when pursued to the individual page.