Spotlight on: Alex Puddy, Chair of Cotswold Antique Dealers Association

Hallett Associate Director, Claire Pardy caught up with Alex Puddy the Chair of CADA in the lead-up to the fair.

Laurie Lee described his poet friend Frank Mansell ‘as Cotswold asa dry-stone wall’ which seems a particularly appropriate way to describe the chair of the Cotswold Antique Dealers’ Association, Alex Puddy, steeped as he is, in Cotswold architectural heritage.

Born in Bath and brought up in Cheltenham, Alex comes from an antique dealing family where everything was for sale including the kitchen table.Apprenticed to an old friend of his father’s Robert de Grand, he spent sometime in Belgium learning the trade and back in the Cotswolds, started dealing in watercolours, travelling throughout the country buying and selling. By the early 1990s he had bought a house and started to establish himself through the classic route for that time, with a stand at Olympia. It was there that he made his first major sale to no other than the enormously stylish dealer, Axel Vervoordt.

Although there is a tendency to think of the Cotswolds as a bastion of the traditional British antique dealer and indeed, they have survived here in greater numbers than anywhere else, like the great British farmer and with a similar average age, diversification has been the key to success. Alex has proved himself particularly adept at this: combining manufacture of a high-quality garden collection made of natural materials with expertly sourced antique statuary and furniture, Modern British art, and sculpture and from time to time, alighting on unattributed or wrongly described sleepers or finds, which he researches to establish an authentic provenance.

Alex’s links with CADA go back 30 years when, in his early 20s, he was a very young committee member. Having drifted away, he was invited back onto the committee by the then Chair, Antique English pottery specialist JohnHoward and when he retired, Alex stepped up just as the fair was getting established at Blenheim Palace. Since then and as Blenheim has evolved with the changing of the old guard, Alex needed to find another home and hit upon Compton Verney. With its fabulous Adam architecture, Capability Brown landscape, diverse permanent collection, and a changing programme of exhibitions, it has proved a popular venue with members and visitors.

In addition to the Fair, he has built two websites and created a house style that combines the traditional and contemporary. His highly professional team ensures that the Fair fulfils the aims of CADA, promoting theCotswolds as a place for leisure, pleasure, and antiques and more specifically, to create an event which brings the Association’s dealers in touch with the wider public. He is the first to admit that BADA and LAPADA do all the hard work, lobbying parliament and ensuring that members are kept informed of changes in legislation and helping them to implement them, but he also feels that as a local association, the members do play an enormously important part.

This year’s fair which runs from the 13^th to the 16^th October at Compton Verney promises to offer a great cross section of dealers with many members returning after all the dramas of the last couple of years.

You can find out more here: www.cotswolds-antiques-art.com/cada-fairs

Find out more about Alex’s company Architectural Heritage here: www.architectural-heritage.co.uk

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