Galleries, exhibitions and wealthy patrons have sustained Bond Street's core role in the art world for more than two centuries, but one type of institution stands apart in terms of attracting buyers, extending the street's theatre and delivering pure, adrenaline-fuelled drama: the auction houses, namely Bonhams (formerly Phillips) and Sotheby's.
"The auction houses sit firmly at the top of the art ecosystem," says Hugo Nathan, a founding partner at Beaumont Nathan, the leading international art advisory and market intelligence firm based just off Bond Street. "The marquee auction weeks often see hundreds of millions of pounds worth of art and collectibles changing hands. Their vibrancy supports the health of the galleries and dealers, which is why so many locate themselves close by. Even young emerging artists and contemporary galleries benefit from the success of these auctions."
Harry Phillips, a former clerk for auction legend James Christie, set up his firm in 1796, creating his 'Great Room' or principal auction hall the following year at 67 New Bond Street. A gifted salesman and showman, Phillips made a name in estate sales. He remains the only auctioneer to have staged such a sale at Buckingham Palace (then Buckingham House), in 1823, selling off surplus items ahead of that building's transformation, including heirloom (40-year-old) succulent plants highly prized by the aristocracy.
Phillips' namesake auction company moved to 101 New Bond Street in 1939. It also bought adjoining Blenstock House, whose Art Deco frontage on Woodstock Street is celebrated. The site was a warren of seven different freeholds when Bonhams acquired (most of) Phillips in 2001. Bonhams made the location its global headquarters and has since boldly remodelled it.
The narrow Edwardian frontage on Bond Street, just four metres wide, now opens – in a coup de théâtre – to a state-of-the-art atrium more than 18 metres tall, all suitably temperature and climate controlled. "An auction house essentially needs to fulfil two functions," explains Alex Lifschutz, of project architects Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands. "It's got to be a warehouse. And it's got to be a theatre."
Sotheby's moved to no. 34 and 35, on the other side of New Bond Street, in 1917. This site also widens as it goes back, in this case east, to St. George Street. It combines no fewer than 17 Georgian townhouses. At its heart are the main upstairs galleries. When a dividing wall is removed, these open into a single arena accommodating 200 seats, space for 40 phone bidders, a press area and standing room at the rear.
Of course, the theatricality and pageantry require not just the right space and extraordinary artwork but also an auctioneer able to play the role of conductor, plus audiences of vetted bidders and, ideally, VIPs. The planning and choreography aren't dissimilar to a West End production on red-carpet opening night.
Sotheby's pioneered the evening 'event' auction in the 1950s and continued to innovate, reinforcing its gallery floors so they could support the formaldehyde tanks consigned by Damien Hirst directly from his studio for a ground-breaking sale in 2008. Even more eventful was the Banksy painting, executed with spray paint and acrylic on canvas, which shredded itself here in 2018, powered by batteries long since hidden inside its stout frame. Sotheby's shredded the flag outside its building when the artwork came up for auction again in 2021.
Today, the pre-sale exhibitions have a special place on the street. Highly accessible – and potentially the last chance to see a masterpiece before it vanishes into private ownership – these events have become phenomena in themselves. The 2023 Freddie Mercury ‘A World of his Own' event, which displayed over 1,400 of the celebrity's personal possessions, claimed to receive more daily visitors than any exhibition dedicated to such a legendary figure ever staged in London, with queues running along the pavements for hundreds of metres.
Bonhams also registered exceptional visitor numbers for its 2024 and 2025 sales of props from shows The Crown and Downton Abbey. The top lot at The Crown's sale was not an heirloom succulent plant but rather a dark green Jaguar XJS Cabriolet serving as Princess Diana's personal car, which sold for £70,250. There were also items for more modest budgets, yet even the swizzle stick used by the Queen Mother to stir drinks on the show fetched £1,664 – more than 20 times its pre-sale estimate (£60-80).
The evocative 'bell wall' seen in Downton Abbey's servants' hall sold for a staggering £216,300 (estimate: just £5,000–£7,000). It could have come from one of Bond Street's own Georgian townhouses, but was created by the show's model makers.
Even the auction houses' own stage scenery has gone under the hammer. Christopher Brannan-Haggas is Global Head of Creative Services at Sotheby's; he held senior visual merchandising roles at Nicole Farhi (on Bond Street) and Calvin Klein, and has a background in theatre design. For the pre-sale exhibition of the Pauline Karpidas collection sale in 2025, his team adorned the building with giant eyes cast in patinated gold, complete with clouded Magrittean pupils.
The eyes sold to the five-star Dolli hotel beside the Acropolis in Athens – the same city where Pauline Parry, from working-class Manchester, opened her clothes boutique, My Fair Lady, in the 1970s. There, she met her shipping magnate husband, Constantinos Karpidas. “Designing the exhibition meant bringing together the physical spaces of Pauline’s London home with the imaginative realm that shaped her collecting," says Brannan-Haggas. "We wanted to create an immersive journey into her world, inviting visitors to step into her mind and subconscious."
These events telescope together shopping, social fixtures (taking their place beside Henley or Wimbledon during the Season), and some of the rarest, most valuable items on the planet – not to forget the exhilaration of the auctions themselves. They would be quite recognisable to the titled Mayfair residents of the 19th and 20th centuries with their clubby estate sales.
The future looks promising, believes Hugo Nathan: "We're entering the much-vaunted era of intergenerational wealth transfer, with a younger generation inheriting and potentially selling prized collections, and also becoming collectors themselves. Meanwhile, the number of visitors coming specifically to Bond Street, to spend money, seems ever-increasing."
There's barely time for a curtain call before the next show begins.