Collecting ANTIQUE LUGGAGE

Exquisitely made suitcases and trunks, both antique and vintage, carry with them all the romance of travel's golden age, says Emma Longstaff

- Emma Longstaff

Budget airlines love to charge extra for luggage, with pricing structures that can make checking in a suitcase almost as expensive as booking a seat.

Consequently, this summer, lots of holidaymakers will carefully decant toiletries into tiny bottles and board the plane in several layers of clothing to avoid excess baggage fees. It's a far cry from the romance of journeys once made by steamship. In the so-called golden age of travel, from the middle of the 19th century to the Second World War, a ship's wealthiest passengers sailed the high seas with entire wardrobes of clothes, hats and accessories packed into elegant sets of bespoke luggage, along with the staff to look after it all. It's this association with a bygone era of ultra-luxurious travel that makes antique luggage so very appealing, thinks Jack Wallis, head of the Fine and Decorative sale at Roseberys Auctioneers.

By the 1860s, fast, iron-hulled steamships could cross the Atlantic in around eight days, equipped with the very best of everything for their discerning first-class clientele. The 1869 opening of the Suez Canal slashed the time it took to travel further afield, to India or Australia. Though journeys were becoming faster, and for the social elite more comfortable, by 1914 it would still take three long weeks to dock at Mumbai (then called Bombay) - via Gibraltar, Marseilles, Port Said, and Aden - and a month or more to arrive in Perth.