York company Podmore & Son restores antique furniture at new Supreme Court in London

Through centuries of use, the small table is scarred with nicks, burns and bumps. But, thanks to the efforts of David’s craftsmen, the old wood has a deep-seated glow which brings out hints of redness in the natural colouring.

The table looks its age and each of those marks tells a story, David says. Someone who didn’t know what they were doing would probably have sanded off the surface to remove them, resulting in a smooth, but bland finish.

“I wanted to keep all this patina, this variation. It is what tells the story of the table,” he says.

That is the secret to restoring antique furniture. Not to make it look new – but to make it look old, yet lovingly preserved.

“It shouldn’t look as though it has been restored,” David says. “It should look as though it has been well cared for all its life.”

If anyone knows how to do that, it is David and his team at Andrew Podmore & Son, near Poppleton, York. David is the ‘& son’. For more than 40 years, the York firm established by his father has been restoring and polishing furniture – and even making it, when called on to do so.

In those four decades, the small family firm has moved a few times. It started off in Grape Lane, moved to Fossgate, then to East Mount Road and finally, almost ten years ago, to a purpose-built workshop near Poppleton.

But it has never abandoned its commitment to traditional craftsmanship, tools and materials – there is even a glue-boiling kettle where fish and animal bones are boiled down to make glue – and to that most important ingredient of all, patience. Patience is one of the keys to achieving a good finish, says craftsman Andrew Jackson, who is lovingly applying layer after layer of polish to an antique Dutch marquetry cabinet. “You can’t rush things.”

David is clearly a man who loves his furniture – and who loves, above all, the imperfections that speak of age, and of furniture crafted by hand.

In the polishing room at his workshop are a pair of magnificent 18th century fruitwood doors from a country house in Ireland. They have been cleaned and restored to a wonderful finish – that rich, deep gleam that stops short of being shiny. But the panels set into the doors have a wavy feel – they aren’t flat and smooth. That waviness is the result of ageing, David explains, the movement caused by knots in the timber expanding ever so slightly over the years. Again, it is part of the story of those doors – and something that cannot be faked.

When making repairs, another thing you can’t fake is the quality of the wood.

The store room at the workshop is packed with cuts of timber: West Indian mahogany, rosewood from a Sri Lankan temple, teak and English oak of all ages. If you are repairing a piece of antique furniture, you need to be able to match the grain and colour and, where possible, age of the wood in the original, David says. Then you need to work it by hand. The finish on wood worked by machine is too flat, perfect and impersonal. Hand-worked wood has soul, and it has something of its maker in it.

Such attention to detail won this small York firm its reputation and led to it playing a major part in the restoration of the Middlesex Guildhall, in London’s Parliament Square, home of the country’s new Supreme Court.

Much of the beautiful furniture in the Portland Stone building was painstakingly restored by Podmore & Son here in York.

There is an entirely new bench at one end of the court, which Podmore’s had nothing to do with. But the woodwork of all 11 benches in the body of the court, and two larger benches at the back, was restored in this workshop.

It was a challenge, admits David.

The benches in what used to be a crown court were originally banked in tiers, a bit like in a traditional lecture theatre. During restoration work on the building, those tiers were taken out. David and his team had to rework the end panels of the 100-year-old benches so they could sit on a flat floor. That meant cutting them all to the same size, filling in grooves or ‘rebates’ on the inside of the panels where the seats once fitted, and carving new rebates that would allow new seats to be fitted to sit on a flat floor.

Layers of shiny, dark varnish also had to be stripped back carefully, one by one, with cloths and toothbrushes to allow the original colour and grain of the century-old English oak to show through.

“It was quite red, and underneath all that varnish, the red colour was still there,” David says. The wood was then repolished, layer upon layer, to build up a deep sheen.

Particular care was needed with the relief carvings on the outside of the panels, and the carved animals on the arms of the bigger benches at the back of the courtroom. They are magnificent – lions and dogs and big cats, none of them the same, all bearing the stamp of the craftsman’s personality.

“They put something of themselves in those animals,” David says.

The small team at Podmore’s – David, his father, and four craftsmen – did all the work from drawings and plans, without ever visiting the court. David still hasn’t been there, but he is looking forward to going at some stage, to see the results of all their hard work in place.

He is quietly confident that his team’s work will stand the test of time. They used the evidence contained in the furniture itself, he says – the colour and grain of the wood, the original craftsmen’s writing and tool-markings – to the achieve what they were looking for: the effect of furniture that was old but had always been well cared for, and that had never had to be restored at all.

“All the evidence we needed was there,” David says. “We just had to work with it.”

The Supreme Court

THE UK Supreme Court is the now the highest court in the land, replacing the Law Lords.

The 12 senior judges who make up the court have left the House of Lords and are now therefore independent – a historic separation of the country’s highest appeal court from Parliament.

In practice, however, the judges’ caseload will be much the same. The court will deal only with cases the justices consider the most important, giving the final verdict in such cases and offering opinions on major points of law. It opened on October 1, when the first case it heard was that of five unnamed terrorist subjects challenging orders freezing their assets.

The new court is housed in the Middlesex Guildhall. An impressive Portland Stone building on Parliament Square, it was built between 1906 and 1913 on the site of an older courthouse. It has served as an office for Middlesex County Council, but in the 1980s was converted to a crown court.

Podmore & Son at work

YOU may well have seen furniture restored or polished by Podmore & Son without ever realising it. The firm polished two new tables at York Crown Court and restored two tables, a spinet piano and a Chippendale-style chair at Fairfax House. It has also worked at churches in the city.

The firm’s handiwork is also on show at St Paul’s Cathedral, in London. Fellow York firm Houghtons was commissioned to make the oak woodwork for a new chapel in the cathedral’s crypt, David Podmore says – and Podmore & Son polished the oak.