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Butter Lane Antiques and the New School of Antique Dealing

Photo credit: Butter Lane Antiques
Photo credit: Butter Lane Antiques

“$56,000, blind, over the internet,” says Alex Alfieri, slightly stunned. “It’s just crazy isn’t it?”

From an office in Altrincham, on the Cheshire side of south Manchester, Alfieri and his business partner Alex ‘Monty’ Cutteridge sell hundreds of thousands of pounds of extraordinary jewellery to people all over the world as Butter Lane Antiques. Their biggest ever sale was, he says “an impulse purchase”.

“We had to have a few big phone calls, there was a bit of back and forth,” he says. “That’s not something that Joe Bloggs who decides he’s gonna start selling online would be able to do.”

On Zoom Alfieri, 31, does most of the talking, and merrily cuts in on Cutteridge’s answers whenever he fancies. Cutteridge is more self-contained. Alfieri, whose dad and grandmother dealt in jewellery and antiques, finds the pieces, largely from dealers and markets in the south; Cutteridge makes them look great for the website. Between their burgeoning Instagram page and a podcast, they represent the arrival of a very new kind of antique dealer.

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The pair first met on the morning of Cutteridge’s interview for a job at Butter Lane. He was desperate to leave his job at PC World. “It was shit and I hated it,” he says.

Photo credit: Butter Lane Antiques
Photo credit: Butter Lane Antiques

Seven years later, business is good. “We’ve probably got five customers who we can essentially count on to spend 50k-plus in a year with us,” says Cutteridge.

“It goes through waves: people have stages where they’ll spend, spend, spend, spend, spend for six months and then go quiet for three months,” says Alfieri. “I always feel like they’ve got their hit, or they’ve got their fix, they’ve got what they need. They don’t need to keep going.”

Now more and more people are wary of the impact their buys have on the planet, antique jewellery is booming, says Alfieri: “We’re selling second-hand pieces of jewellery which aren’t having any impact on the environment.”

Cutteridge agrees. “You have people saying, I don’t know what I want but I know I don’t want a new diamond ring that’s been mined in South Africa – I want something that’s old.”

Some things don’t change. Engagement rings are constantly in demand, as are quirky pieces with animal designs. “Coloured stones at the moment are flying – sapphires are really popular, if they’re really good quality, certificated, Sri Lankan sapphires,” says Alfieri. “We won’t keep them more than 48 hours.”

What pieces have been particularly difficult to let go of? Alfieri cringes. “Eurgh! Oh God. I had this Russian miniature egg pendant, enamelled, diamond-set, stylised as a tennis ball. Pre-Revolution. It was absolutely amazing.”

Photo credit: Butter Lane Antiques
Photo credit: Butter Lane Antiques

Unfortunately, it had to be sacrificed for the greater good. “I mugged it away. It was too cheap. Back in the early days we had no cash and we were scratching, and sometimes on payday we’d have to turn something over quick because we’d have to get the money in to cover the wages and pay the bills, as any new business is. This offer came in and I remember thinking, ‘Aw I’m gonna have to take that – everyone’s relying on me here for their wages’.”

It still stings. “Fucking hell, you’ve ruined my day now, mate,” Alfieri laughs. Had it been authenticated as Fabergé, it could have gone for north of £20,000. They let it go for a grand.

Last year, Alfieri and Cutteridge put together the first series of a podcast, Dealing, to talk about the business, antiques and anything else that came to mind, and help potential buyers get more comfortable with the idea of buying jewellery from them over the internet. It’s been more than just a promo tool too. Over a pair of episodes titled ‘Catastrophic Events, Part 1’ and ‘Catastrophic Events, Part 2’, Alfieri and Cutteridge talked about “the big ugly elephant that’s constantly in the room”: that Alfieri is lucky to be here at all.

“I’d never heard you sit down and tell that story from start to finish,” says Cutteridge.

“Not like, ‘I was born with a health condition!’” Alfieri says in a woe-is-me whine. “But it was good, I was ready to do it. I wanted to do it.”


It’s important to say at the top here that Alfieri isn’t really given to self-pity. We talk on Zoom again in early February, just after the two-year anniversary of the most catastrophic of the Catastrophic Events and he’s been hitting the Peloton bike hard. In spite of everything, Alfieri says, it’s “a celebration now”.

“It's not like ‘Ohhh, shit’. It's not doom and gloom, because I'm so far past how bleak it was at the beginning.”

Alfieri was born with a rare heart condition called transposition of the great arteries. Essentially, his pulmonary artery, taking blood to his lungs to pick up oxygen, and his aorta, which takes it to the rest of the body, were in each other’s place. He had three open-heart surgeries before he was nine years old, but otherwise had a pretty normal childhood.

After a trip to Dubai in his mid-twenties, though, he started feeling strange: short of breath, weak and sluggish. He looked grey. When he got home, his parents forced him to go to A&E in Manchester. There, doctors told him he needed a heart transplant. Alfieri remembers bursting into tears.

It got worse. At the specialist transplant centre at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, he was told that he’d need not just his heart replacing, but his lungs too. Alfieri’s condition improved, but he knew that he’d get worse as the months wore on. Still in shock, he went back to work.

A random encounter with a family friend on holiday in Marbella – who fortuitously, enough, is a retired heart and lung transplant surgeon – got him an assessment at his local hospital in Wythenshawe, south Manchester, and a place on the general transplant list. Everything was looking up. Then the armed robbery happened.

One Thursday night, Alfieri was at home watching Ozark with a beer when a brick came through his patio doors. Four men in balaclavas wielding hammers and machetes burst in demanding cash and jewellery. They made off with about £500 and a few bits and pieces, and on top of that the stress and trauma helped push Alfieri’s delicately balanced condition downhill.

“We were waiting for the phone to ring with a suitable donor. And it didn't ring. So it was like, liver was going into failure, kidneys were already in failure. Everything was shutting down, basically.”

He was on the critical list, and waiting in Wythenshawe hospital in the hope that donor organs could be found while he was in the ‘transplant window’: ill enough to really need them, but well enough to survive. Eventually he ran out of time.

“I was dying, essentially. And we'd run out of options. The window, the transplant window, had closed,” he says. “I don't actually think I understood the extent of what was actually happening. I was probably a bit away with the fairies.”

The last chance open was to fit a battery-powered pump for his heart called a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD. At 29, Alfieri didn’t much fancy being hooked up to a battery on a vest for the rest of his life. “But I mean, push came to shove – I was like, ‘Well, I've not got much choice here. I don't want to die.’”

At first the surgery seemed to have gone well. But when his doctors went to bring him out of sedation a few days after the surgery, Alfieri wouldn’t wake up. A week after the surgery, Cutteridge got a call from Alfieri’s mum. A piece of debris from the surgery had travelled from his heart to his brain, and he’d had a major stroke.

The outlook was extremely bleak. Alfieri’s family, he says, were “sitting around my bedside, like, with heads in hands being told, ‘Okay, we think he's gonna survive, but there's no brain activity going on. So, you know, brace yourself for the worst’.”

“I was out of it for months. And it was it was so touch and go. But I wasn't there! I was, I was… I was just a vessel lying in a bed, you know. I was done.”

He was in a coma for three months. All that time, his mind was still whirring. “It was almost like a huge hallucinogenic drug trip,” he says. On a post-coma holiday, he decided to note down everything he could recall. Sometimes he dreamed he was being shown around nursing homes, sometimes that someone was sleeping on his hospital room floor. He imagined that his stepdaughter was whizzing around the place on a hoverboard. After he came to, he was convinced that he was in India. The recovery was slow, and left a lot of time for wondering why everything had happened.

“I often used to think like, ‘Fucking hell, if I just maybe went down to theatre five minutes later on, or if they told me they were doing the injection to put me to sleep, I would have stayed awake. I could have been awake for a few more seconds.’ And maybe... you know chaos theory? Chaos theory would say like an extra 10 seconds later, or if someone had an extra cup of coffee in the morning, then maybe it wouldn't have happened. But it's useless because... it did happen. It's cool.” He pauses. “Well, it's not cool. But I mean, I've dealt with it.”

Photo credit: Butter Lane Antiques
Photo credit: Butter Lane Antiques

It’s nobody’s fault, really, he says. In fact, he’s hoping the surgeon who fitted the LVAD will do his transplant one day. “Everything happens for a reason. I have my own thoughts on why this why God or whatever... external pow­–” He stops himself. “Why this happened to me. I have my own thoughts and beliefs.”

Like what? “I would have just gone from zero to a million and probably ended up not respecting the machine and just thinking, ‘Oh my god, I feel amazing’. Like, ‘You know what, I'm gonna go run a marathon, I have all this energy,’ and whatever. But the stroke has slowed [me down].”

Instead, he’s gradually been able to build himself back up and is now in great shape, and putting in mile after mile on his exercise bike. “Apart from the fact that this arm is not great, I've lost movement in my left side, I'm back now. My legs are back. I'm mobile, I'm mentally fully functioning.”

Recovering from the trauma of what had happened was as debilitating in its own way. “I was never diagnosed but I wasn't myself – I lost this part of myself in the first six months. And the rehab was basically just about the physical side of things, but the mental was being ignored.”

After two years and a lot of physio, Alfieri says, “I am my old self again, albeit a little bit slower, because my legs won't carry me as fast as I just need them to carry me, but it's okay. That's fine.”

He will still need a transplant one day. But after everything, Alfieri says he’s now feeling the best he can remember. Each year strokes affect 40,000 younger people in the UK, including several hundred children, and Alfieri’s been working with the Stroke Association to raise awareness. He shows off the dark green LVAD vest. Oddly, it means he doesn’t have a pulse. He is, however, very much alive.


While all of this was going on Cutteridge was left minding the shop, frantically trying to keep everything moving. It was a difficult time, but Butter Lane pulled through. Now they’re ready for when the time comes for Alfieri to be out of action: there’s a ‘transplant box’ of stock set by, ready to be drip-fed to buyers.

The hardest piece to dig for, they say, is a Lover’s Eye. Most popular in England, France and Russia between 1790 and 1820, it’s a brooch or ring with a tiny miniature painting – and we’re talking painted-with-a-single-hair-paintbrush tiny here – of the eye of the owner’s beloved on porcelain, bone or ivory. It’s thought only a thousand examples were ever made.

“I’ve never had one,” says Alfieri. “I’ve never bought one, and if I have bought one I’m so wary because there’s so many copies out there, that I wouldn’t want to put our name to it.”

Photo credit: Butter Lane Antiques
Photo credit: Butter Lane Antiques

“It’s the most sentimental of sentimental things, and they’re so scarce, but people know that,” says Cutteridge. “The demand is also there. They’ll command ridiculous money.”

The main thing to remember if you’re going searching yourself is to make sure you talk to dealers and get the full rundown on a piece, says Cutteridge. “This stuff is all about the age and the history and the stories behind it, and the only way to get to those is digging and finding out.”

For Alfieri, the fun of buying, selling and searching has changed over the years. “The selling, I don’t get anything off anymore – I used to be like, ‘Oh my god we’ve just earnt a thousand pounds off that!’ I’d jump up and down behind my desk, so happy.”

Now the pieces themselves are where most of the joy is. “The pleasure doesn’t come in the sell because half the time I don’t want to sell it – I want to keep it, because I love it. I look at this stuff so fondly, and I believe me and Monty look at things differently because we handle things so frequently. It’s a joy to hold some of this stuff. It’s miniature works of art.”

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