ABSTRACT
THE 1760s saw a new phase for English silver, one in which innovations in both technology and design combined to produce a fresh product, appealing to new markets. Three factors – silverplating, neo-classicism and competition from new centres – combined to bring about this transformation. Because both more trade records and immeasurably more silver has survived from the later eighteenth century onwards, and because the shapes are familiar and in many cases still in production, we are no longer reliant upon contemporary documents to provide us with their names or functions.1
