Jane and Edwin came this weekend and on Saturday we went along to Andy Thornton's Architectural Antiques Mill at West Vale near Halifax. Andy Thornton's is quite a substantial business which has been built up over the last thirty years and which specialises in buying bits of old buildings and selling them on for restaurants, pubs and footballers' houses. Almost everything is available somewhere within the six-floor mill complex, including outdoor monuments, oak-panelled rooms, and church furnishings.
You get a weird feeling going around the place - like being in a museum where everything has a price-tag (quite literally). But you have to ask where the market for such things is going to go to in these troubled times.
Perhaps the whole business will finish up as a double monument : the antiques are a monument to a bygone age - the hefty price-tags and the unsold stock are a monument to a collapsing market.
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