Friday 25 February 2011

Breakfast and a dash of silver


Weekend brunches are as popular as ever at restaurants, but why not aim to enjoy your own ‘five star’ breakfast at home each weekend by snapping up some traditional silver tableware for a bit of extra style?

A new selling exhibition at the London Silver Vaults in London’s Chancery Lane is on now until the end of May 2011 and has all the items you could think of, and some you will never have heard of, for a proper 'full English'.

Expect to find lots of tea- and coffee pots, familiar Old English style silver cutlery, toast racks, butter knives, butter dishes and jam pots. More suprising is the 1930s rollover silver dish for keeping the cooked food warm, an insulated Argyll jug for keeping liquids warm, spoon warmers and egg coddlers, little silver combo sets for boiled eggs with a spoon and bowl for the salt and pepper and even modern silver tops for Marmite and ketchup jars.

Breakfast and particularly teapots seem to have inspired the silversmith's flights of fancy over the years. Moving into the surreal there is a very rare tea-set of teapot, jug and sugar bowl all in the shape of chickens (see pic). Another tea-set is shaped like garden snails. For the coffee drinkers there are pretty, lemon coloured ceramic espresso cups with silver saucers, designed in 2005 or cafe au lait pots in hammered silver from the turn of the century Arts & Crafts era. Rise and Shine - Silver at the Breakfast table is on until the end of May in the downstairs foyer of the 30 shops at the London Silver Vaults in Chancery Lane, London WC2, a few hundred yards from Chancery Lane Tube.
Prices are from £45 to £4,500 with most items under £500.