The £150k doll’s house
Antiques Roadshow expert wowed by toy that’s been kept in family for 300 years
IT takes something extraordinarily special to break with Antiques Roadshow tradition – and the Westbrook doll’s house proved to be exactly that. Presenter Fergus Gambon was delighted to be shown a box of 300-yearold dolls while at Tewkesbury Abbey, Gloucestershire.
But he was even more stunned to discover that the owner had the whole doll’s house at home, intact and unchanged for centuries. So in a first for the Sunday night show, Gambon jumped straight in a car with a camera crew and raced to see the remarkable and rare heirloom.
The family was shocked to hear that the doll’s house, which was built in 1705 for a Miss E Westbrook, could be worth more than £150,000. It has been in the owner’s family ever since, passing down the female line for generations.
Only a handful of doll’s houses from the period have survived, but the so- called Westbrook baby house is exceptionally wellpreserved, with the dolls in their original clothes. Baby house is what a doll’s house was called at the time.
Gambon said it was ‘ one of the most important English baby houses in existence’ and it was ‘quite stunning for it just to turn up like that’. Admitting that the episode, which airs tomorrow, was ‘most unortho- dox’, he added: ‘As soon as I saw the dolls I recognised the importance of it. It is quite a large object, it’s extraordinarily fragile, it’s not something that you can just shove in the back of the car and bring over.
‘If we wanted to show the viewers what the house was like, this was really our only chance.’
The antiques expert, who is the son of actor Sir Michael Gambon, had seen images of the house in a book from the 1950s.
‘I saw the dolls first and I recognised them immediately from the pictures,’ he said.