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Egyptian Mummies and the R.A - it's London in June! ,

© Stuart Buchanan MacWatt

June is surely the most exciting month to be in London. The Royal Parks are caparisoned with trees in bright new leaf. The flower beds of Kensington Palace Gardens Regent’s Park and St.James’s Park are a picturesque riot of massed colour. The Park lakes are alive with newly hatched water fowl. Londoners look and feel good in the warm sunshine after a debilitating winter.

The London Season now moves into overdrive. The Queen's invitations to her Buckingham Palace Garden Parties next month have already been sent out to some 8000. This month a plethora of Fine Art and antiques fairs and auctions and Gallery exhibitions draws the World to London. At Olympia the annual Summer Fine Art and Antiques Fair lasts until 17 June in tandem with the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair takes place, as it has done for the past 80 years, at Le Meridien Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane from 13 - 19th June. In Piccadilly the Park Lane Hotel hosts the International Ceramics Fair from 15 - 18 June.

With over 400 exhibitors showing everything from ancient Egyptian sarcophagi to Madonna’s wedding bracelet with price tags from under £100 to the giddy heights of £500,000, the 28th annual Olympia Fair is too vast and indigestible a feast to do justice to on one visit. Notting Hill dealers Peter Petrou and Jay Arenski have provided the eye-catching piece of the year with a fully provenanced Egyptian mummy in its painted coffin, circa 1000 BC for the asking price of £180,000.

I was delighted to find that the Grosvenor House Hotel has undertaken £6 million worth of elegant refurbishment of the Great Room, creating extra space which has enabled the Fair organisers to increase the number of dealers and galleries this year to 93. Amongst all the superb furniture, sculpture, antiquities and Fine Art in this vast room it was a small item that most appealed to me; an exquisite art nouveau pendant signed by Rene Lalique of a nude golden lady her spread butterfly wings in ‘window enamel’ set with diamonds.

Those interested in ephemera should join the Ephemera Society, (tel: 01923 829079) and visit their members only one day Summer Fair at the Hotel Russell near the British Museum. I shall be there in search of Victorian Valentine cards to add to my collection. While in the area I shall pop in to have a second look at the British Museum’s Cleopatra Exhibition.

The Royal Academy’s annual

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