ONE of the last vestiges of Islington’s antiques trading heyday has closed its doors after 35 years in business on the Essex Road – with a sofa showroom taking its place.

Criterion Auction House opened in 1989 – when every other coffee shop and restaurant on today’s Upper Street was an antiques dealer and Islington was one of London’s top destinations for finding never-before-seen treasures and knick-knacks.

On Fridays, curious punters and art dealers alike would queue outside Criterion before it opened to get eyes on the items that would be up for auction the following Monday night.

“In a live auction you’ve got less than a minute to auction a lot and we had 500, 600 lots every week for 34 years,” recalled Graham Richards, who set up Criterion after tiring of his city job at 28 years old.

“There was always a buzz – the room would be full of people all part of the tapestry of it. The great thing about the auction world is it crosses everything – wealth, taste, class. You just don’t know who’s coming in and you don’t know who’s got money until they start bidding.”

Criterion is now fully online, operating an automated system that gives five or six days for customers to place their bids and swaps the parking nightmares of the Essex Road for a modern warehouse with a loading bay on the North Circular.

If there is any bidding in the last five minutes, five extra minutes are added to the auction, taking some of the frenzy out of a centuries-old tradition.

“The whole trade couldn’t exist without decency. It was built on trust – anything untoward was always in the minority,” Mr Richards added.

The pandemic accelerated Criterion’s move online, which was a positive for the business, if not for those with a yearning for Islington past.

“It was so labour intensive, so clumsy, so inefficient – porters carrying stuff around and putting it into place, and then on a Friday afternoon we’d go round and snap one photograph for each item and put it online as an afterthought,” Mr Richards said. “Our lives are much easier now – we do more business and spend less doing it. So if nostalgia is the same as a cold sweat, I’m experiencing nostalgia just thinking about it.”