Sell Your Silver

John Surtees buys silverware and silver items directly from the public, at our showroom in the London Silver Vaults: antique and vintage pieces, canteens of cutlery, tea services, trophies, and individual items, whether or not you already know what you have. We pay for what a piece actually is, not just what it weighs.

Most businesses that advertise buying silver are refineries or bullion traders, and they price everything the same way: by melting it down and paying for the metal it contains. That’s a fair offer for genuine scrap, but it’s the wrong offer for a canteen of cutlery, a Georgian teapot, or a set that’s been in a family for three generations. Pieces like that are usually worth considerably more intact than melted. We’re silversmiths and dealers first, and we look at the maker, the hallmark, the period, and the condition of a piece, before we ever consider its weight.

Auction is often suggested as the natural alternative to a dealer, and for many things it’s a good one. It’s less reliable for silver, and it rarely favours the seller’s actual proceeds. Auction houses charge on both sides of the same sale: a buyer’s premium added on top of the hammer price for the buyer, and a separate seller’s commission deducted from that same hammer price for the vendor, typically 10 to 20 per cent plus VAT, before cataloguing, insurance, or unsold-lot fees are even considered. The auction house is paid either way; the seller carries the risk of where the hammer falls. Because a silver lot’s auction price depends heavily on style and who’s bidding on the day, rather than just its weight, it isn’t unusual for what actually reaches the seller, after commission, to come in below what the same silver would fetch sold directly for its metal content. Selling to us skips both fees entirely: no buyer’s premium, no seller’s commission, and no dependence on who happens to be in the room.

We buy most forms of genuine sterling silver, and plenty of silver plate too, whether it’s a single spoon or an entire canteen:

• Canteens and part-canteens of cutlery, complete or incomplete
• Tea and coffee services
• Trophies, cups, and presentation pieces
• Trays, salvers, and bowls
• Candlesticks and candelabra
• Individual or odd pieces, such as a single spoon, a christening mug, or a napkin ring
• Silver you’re not sure about: plated, damaged, unmarked, or inherited without any paperwork

A refinery values silver one way: by weight, at the current bullion price, minus their margin. We start there too. It’s the floor, not the ceiling. From there, we look at whether a piece is worth more as itself: is it hallmarked, who made it, is it a complete set, is it in a style that’s currently sought after. A complete twelve-setting Georgian canteen is worth far more sold as a canteen than melted for its silver content, and that difference is the real reason to bring it to a dealer rather than a scrap buyer.

Not every piece is worth more whole than melted, and even then the story doesn’t end there. Some of what we take in is sold on as scrap to refineries, but a good deal is kept and reused directly in our own workshop, as raw material for the contemporary silver we make ourselves. Working with our own reclaimed silver lowers the cost of new production, which helps keep prices competitive for the next generation of silversmiths training and working in the trade. Silver is one of the few luxury materials that can be melted down and remade indefinitely without losing anything: a kind of recycling that’s been standard practice in this trade for hundreds of years, and one that most other luxury industries simply can’t offer.

John Surtees has traded from the London Silver Vaults since 1994, three decades in the same building where more silver changes hands than anywhere else in the world. Founder John Surtees began his career at The Royal Mint; his son Simon, who runs the business today, started his apprenticeship in the Vaults at 16. Both are members of the Goldsmiths’ Company, which oversees UK hallmarking. We’re not a pop-up buyer or a postal-only scheme. You can walk in, show us what you have, and get an honest answer in person.

Our showroom is in the London Silver Vaults, Chancery Lane, a short walk from Chancery Lane station and an easy trip in from anywhere in London or the wider South East. Bring what you have, or get in touch first with photographs if you’d rather know what to expect before you travel in.

If you have silver you’re thinking of selling, whether a single piece or an entire collection, bring it to our showroom in the London Silver Vaults, or get in touch with photographs first.
Vault 3, 5, 16, 53-64 Chancery Lane, London, WC2A 1QS.