Welcome to Alfies, where one stall might offer a perfectly preserved vintage dress in midnight silk, and the next a display of taxidermy.
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00:00I started here in 1976 and been here 48 years, I believe, yeah.
00:06On Church Street, which sits on the broad smudge of the border that fractions St John's Wood from Marlborough,
00:12is a building that has stood there since 1880.
00:14This is Alfie's Antiques Market.
00:16It covers 35,000 square foot over four floors,
00:19opens five days a week and has somewhere around 100 traders.
00:24I love the silver, as you can see, there's plenty of evidence of that at this moment.
00:29But, yeah, I've got a love of passion for it, especially barware,
00:34which is quite a good thing to know about these days,
00:37if you enjoy drinking or making them, yeah.
00:41It's somewhere its visitors might get blindly lost in among the labyrinth of staircases and thresholds.
00:46There are clusters of antiques clocks ticking in in perfect unison.
00:49Alfie's is a promiscuous slow dance with the past.
00:52It's possible to find a £5 paperback beside a £5,000 Art Nouveau desk
00:57or costume jewellery next to a case glittering with emeralds.
01:00The place is a constant distraction.
01:01Come in for picture frames and you might leave manhandling an Eames chair.
01:05Dealers guide the wandering lost, but also practise seduction.
01:08They will never share the price without detailing a storied past and imagining a future.
01:13They do not sell relics, they will say.
01:15They sell a chance to take a bit of history and re-imagine it for now.
01:19In a disposable world, Alfie's is a champion of objects made to last
01:23and of beautiful things being given a new life.