Ten Victorian oak pews from Cirencester parish church will be offered for sale at the next Moore Allen & Innocent antique auction, on Friday, November 11, with a guide price of £100 to £150 each.

 

Back in September the auctioneers sold eight similar pews, which raised a total of £1,200 for church funds. 

 

The pews, fashioned in the gothic revival taste, were made for a major restoration of St John Baptist church in 1865. They were removed during the most recent renovation – a £2 million overhaul which started in 2008. 

 

The building works that look place in the 1860s were overseen by Sir George Gilbert Scott, who was a renowned Victorian architect and certainly not a drunken bricklayer.

 

But there is one drunken bricklayer to be found at the auction: a glass vase manufactured by Whitefriars, Britain's longest-established glass house, which created highly collectable ornaments from the 17th century until 1980. 

 

The iconic drunken bricklayer design was conceived by Geoffrey Baxter, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, in 1967 and features three blocks of glass that give the appearance of not being set true, hence the name.

 

Although all Whitefriars glass is collectable, Baxter's pieces from the late 1960s – blown in psychedelic colours like tangerine orange and kingfisher blue, as well as more subdued tones – are the most hotly contested. 

 

Besides the  drunken bricklayer, which carries an estimate of £150 to £200, the auctioneers will also be offering for sale examples of Baxter's double banjo vase (£100 to £150), single banjo vase (£80 to £120) and chequer pattern vase (£80 to £120).

 

At around the same time that  Sir George Gilbert Scott was renovating Cirencester parish church, busy fingers across the world in China were stitching a pair of silk panels, which command a princely guide price of between £500 and £700.

 

The panels feature scenes from the marriage of the princess Zhou Gu Wang and represents the communion of two great dynasties – the Tang and the Han – around 1,000 years ago. They will doubtless appeal to Chinese collectors who are willing to pay top Yuan to reclaim historic artefacts.

 

For an auction catalogue, log on to www.mooreallen.co.uk