Collecting antique bottles has been a popular hobby in Britain since the late 1960s or early 1970s. For almost 40 years hundreds or even thousands of enthusiasts have scoured the country every weekend, searching cellars, attics, rivers, ponds, Victorian dump sites, and every type of place where our forefathers might have discarded or abandoned their wine, spirit, fizzy pop, ink or medicine bottles.

There are a couple of results of these four decades of searching that are relevant to bottle collectors and searchers today:

Firstly, forty years of bottle digging means that there is now a relatively ready supply of interesting and often very affordable antique bottles to be found in antique shops, bric-a-brac shops, car boot sales, and charity shops. The huge numbers of antique bottles recovered over the past 30 or 40 years means that, although a small number of highly sought-after rarities now command prices in the hundreds of pounds, the monetary value of many British antique bottles has not risen by very much at all. In some cases value has even failed to keep up with inflation: Ordinary codd bottles that might have sold for a couple of pounds in the 1970s are in many cases worth about the same amount, or even less, now. This might irritate people who only view these things in terms of investment potential, but it does mean that a good representative collection of historically interesting bottles can be built up very cheaply without having to spend a fortune, or to get tired, dirty and sweaty shovelling through Victorian rubbish.

Secondly, most (but by no means all!) of the easily found, easily accessed digging sites were found and dug 20 or 30 years ago. Discovering sites now often requires much more perseverance, research, and luck than was the case in the early days. Having said that, it's also true that only an tiny proportion of all Victorian dump sites have been dug. The great majority remain untouched (even if they are difficult to find), and a lot of them only need to be located in order to give up their Victorian and Georgian bottles, jars and pots.

We are very much get-out-and-search collectors, and will often spend days or entire weekends scouring town and country for sites where we can find 100+ year old bottles for ourselves.

Click here to see How we dig, our Bottle Digging Code of Conduct, and Permissions.