The spring Decorative Fair runs in Battersea Park from 11 to 16 May 2027, over 130 dealers with garden statuary and outdoor decoration in focus.
A dateline is the rule that decides what a fair will admit, and this one stops at 1979. That was a deliberate break: when the fair was founded in 1985 to put the antiques and interior design trades in one room, it became the first in Britain to take post-war design seriously alongside period furniture, and the line has moved forward with it. The family that started it still runs it, from Battersea Park, where it has been since 1997.
Each of the three editions has its own weather. The May fair is the one that turns outward, because it lands at the point in the year when a garden is being planned rather than survived, so statuary, urns, outdoor furniture and architectural pieces take a stronger position on the floor than they hold in January or September.
The spring fair runs from Tuesday 11 to Sunday 16 May 2027, with the usual 130 or so dealers in antiques, fine and decorative art and twentieth-century design from the 1700s to the 1970s. Bone Idyll caters the mezzanine restaurant, and a courtesy coach runs from Sloane Square. What sells here is bought to be lived with rather than catalogued, which is why the decorator’s diary and not the museum’s sets these dates. The fair was the first in Britain to take post-war design seriously, and the other London fairs followed it there.