Posts by Tony Thorncroft, Guest blog

The Chichester Festival Theatre launches its summer season with a small drinks party for the critics, especially the critics of the national newspapers who are happy to come down from London for the first night. Around ten years ago the reviewers looked slightly mystified. 

One of the familiar London experiences of a generation or so ago was to stroll down Bond Street or Cork Street, glancing in at the ubiquitous art galleries crowding there, to observe a bored young Sloane painting her nails and waiting desperately for a potential customer. It is an image of the past. Now many of those galleries will have transmogrified into global fashion shops and, in those that linger on, the listless girl will have been replaced by a harassed man anxiously searching a computer for an internet sale. Today the passing trade has all but disappeared for art and antique dealers: business is done mainly online – or at art fairs.