okay so this is a this is a Polaroad table full-size table and we bought
this from a private house in Middlesbrough and I really like this because
it's fitted beautifully on one end and we don't want to change that you get that
difference in color and you can't replicate that so well you know we'd
prefer to try and keep this we'd give it a light wax and let the table be as it
should I guess
quite a keen player in Northern Ireland when I was 16 and played a pretty good
standard was Northern Ireland Belfast champion under 19 champion and always
had a love for billyton snooker and of course you've got the iconic Alex Higgins
from Belfast that was you know something to to be admired and to be
beholded so yeah I played to a high standard and my love of the game has
always been there and I met my wife Julia when I moved to England and we were
both interested in antiques and we began to move towards billyton snooker tables
which were we're quite fashionable at the time and we were we drawn to them we
found them romantic and we we love the different designs and we loved the the
history particularly any provenance that came with the table and we started to
buy and sell mostly to the trade I guess in about 97 98 and then we decided that
we we felt we could do it better we felt we had a more sympathetic approach to
to restore a billyton table to how we wanted it done how we perceived it and
so we started pretty pretty seriously in 98 and we moved on to exhibitions in
London 99 and I think we had a really became you know great reputation for
sympathetic restoration about keeping that old polish on a bigger table keeping
the patina why would you want to erase 150 years of use and color and character
from something so that was our main ethos what when we started was to try to
retain all of those idiosyncrasies belonging to a particular table
it's a great privilege to work on these billyton tables we're restoring
something which was made 150 or 170 years ago you know these craftsmen they
spent hours manufacturing cushions legs or neat carvings and brackets achieving
something which in today's modern commercial market is very difficult to
reproduce so we like to take our time restoring these tables to a very very
high level
