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This wooden box with a detachable lid is a reel box, and can hold up to four sewing reels. It is an example of Tunbridge ware – a form of decoratively inlaid woodwork in which of a mosaic of tiny pieces of different coloured woods form a picture. This work was characteristic of Tunbridge Wells and Tonbridge, Kent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This reel box is stamped in three places with images of East Grinstead, West Sussex.

1 reel box: wood; good condition