‘I’m getting out’: Britain’s antiques dealers hit by Brexit

It is a modest living but for the past 20 years Ruth Butterworth has managed to turn a passion for vintage French decorative items into a profitable livelihood, scouring France’s brocante flea markets and antique trade shows for items to resell back in the UK.

But since Brexit took the UK out of the EU’s single market in January, Butterworth — like many small-time “white van” antiques dealers in Britain — has found herself on the wrong side of a complex trade border that she doesn’t have either the energy or appetite to overcome.

“Brexit has just finished it for me, I’m getting out of the business,” she said while attending to customers browsing her collections of white faience pottery and benetiers — holy water fonts — at her pitch at last month’s Ardingly Antiques Fair in West Sussex, near England’s south coast.

It is a heartbreaking decision for 56-year-old Butterworth, but one that plenty of other stallholders at the Ardingly fair say they are also taking as they grapple with the need for customs declarations, value added tax payments and all the other formalities now required of UK traders with the EU.

“For a lot of the smaller boys the ‘white van’ trade with Europe is dead,” said Paul Ridges, who has a shop in Swanage, Dorset, and has been importing antiques and vintage items from France for almost 40 years. 

He explains how before Brexit he could take his van on a night crossing to France to visit a trade fair in Le Mans, “drop 10 grand in four hours” buying French pieces, and then be back in the UK on the 3pm crossing the following day, completing the trip in 24 hours.

“Now I have to get an invoice for every single thing in my vehicle, and if I’m banging around a French brocante I could buy 150 items — from a coffee pot to a Louis XVI table. And this being a cash business, many French traders just don’t want to give a receipt,” he explained.

Matters are complicated further by the fact that antique items that are more than 100 years old are tariff-free and rated at 5 per cent for VAT, whereas ‘vintage’ items that are less than a century old attract the full 20 per cent rates and even some import duties.

“The government advice is ‘get a shipping agent’, but that can take five to seven days to sort the paperwork at both ends, and by the time all the fees and taxes are paid, then the cash gains of the business are just gone,” he added.

The impact of the new barriers to the casual trade in antiques has also been felt in the opposite direction, with the number of EU traders at this year’s Ardingly Fair down by 65 per cent, according to Will Thomas, the managing director of International Antiques & Collectors Fairs, which organises the sales events across the UK.

An unknown proportion of that reduction was down to Covid-19 restrictions, Thomas added, hoping that many EU traders would return. But the mood among sellers at the Ardingly fair is pessimistic.

Mattias Vachet, 49, French antique furniture dealer originally from Avignon who has been living in Chertsey, Surrey, since 2012 with his British wife, said he was packing up and going back home to France, partly because demand for his services was drying up.

“I’m moving back. I just can’t be bothered with Brexit,” he said, “I had big plans to start a wholesale business centre for French dealers in the UK. Originally I had 20 people interested, now I have only five.”

Thomas of the IACF said that his business was helping some sellers diversify online, opening a new auctions website, although for traders who are used to sealing deals with wads of cash and the shake of a hand, the online sales rules guaranteeing customers the legal right to return goods after 30 days are sometimes a struggle.

For other dealers, such as Keith and Jean Thompson out buying for their business Rams Head Antiques in Wolsingham, County Durham, Brexit has caused headaches in exporting, not importing — as EU clients purchasing from their UK website are hit by unforeseen charges and taxes on delivery.

“Don’t ask me about Brexit,” said Thompson in between haggling with a dealer over three gilt-framed Louis-Philippe mirrors, eventually settling on £2,000 cash, and producing a thick wad of £20 notes from a satchel round his waist.

“Our trade used to be about 30 per cent with the EU — customers in France, Italy and Germany — but since the restrictions came in, it’s pretty much down to zero,” he said.

Still, not everyone at Ardingly was giving up. For other dealers, such as Cambridgeshire-based Kevin Hairsine, Brexit has provided an opportunity, allowing him to open a customs and advisory service charging clients £180 a month for advice.

Hairsine, who studied for a qualification at the online UK Customs Academy, is preparing to offer clearance services for clients trying to negotiate new thickets of regulation. These are expected to become more complex when the UK introduces full customs controls later this year, which the UK government unilaterally delayed for a year to give British businesses more time to adjust.

He said that some taxidermy items would need to be cleared through the CITES convention for endangered species, for example, while wood products are subject to different controls depending on which category they fall into.

“There are subtleties, he explained. “A wooden French Louis XIV table won’t need to go through Forestry Commission timber controls, but an old tree trunk that has been made into a table, that still has bark on it, will.” 

A few stalls further down, another sole trader, Henry Vaughan, is also looking to cash in and is working with his brother, who lives in France, to provide a full delivery service allowing antique dealers to shop in French markets and deliver to a hub in France for onward delivery.

In between offering someone a price on an old French tin bath, Vaughan said he thought his new venture would be popular, but still assumed many smaller dealers would not bother. “It used to take a fiver to get that bath back, now it’s £40 and a lot of headache. Multiply that across hundreds of items and for many dealers it’s too much. It has wiped a lot of people out.”

Still, Kathryn Singer, strategy director of the British Antique Dealers’ Association, said she hoped that wily traders on both sides of the Channel would learn to adjust.

“Brexit has definitely created a lot of new paperwork and protocols, and we’re working with the government to see where these can be reduced. But dealers are a pretty tenacious breed and they tend to figure things out,” she said.