EPNS, silver plate and sterling

Three different things arrive at a valuation day described as silver.

1. Sterling silver

Solid silver, at least 92.5% pure, and in Britain it carries a punched hallmark: a standard mark, an assay office mark, a maker’s mark and usually a date letter. It is silver all the way through. Wear does not change its colour, because there is nothing underneath.

2. Old Sheffield plate

Made from roughly the 1740s to the 1840s. A sheet of silver was fused to a copper ingot and the two rolled out together, so the finished sheet is a sandwich. It was worked like silver and some of it is very good indeed.

Where it wears — the high points of a rim, the edge of a tray — it shows a warm copper blush coming through. That copper is the tell, and it is also, oddly, a point in its favour: genuine Old Sheffield plate is collected in its own right, and heavy-handed replating ruins it.

3. Electroplate, including EPNS

From about the 1840s, silver could be deposited electrically onto a finished base-metal object. It was far cheaper than fusing, it could coat shapes that could not be rolled, and it took over the market.

EPNS is the common British marking: electroplated nickel silver. The base is nickel silver — an alloy of copper, nickel and zinc — which is silver-coloured and contains no silver whatsoever. The only silver in an EPNS teapot is the plated skin, measured in microns.

Where electroplate wears through, the metal underneath is grey or yellowish rather than copper, which is how it is told from Old Sheffield plate.

Why plate carries no hallmark

Hallmarking is a guarantee about precious metal content, so it applies to gold, silver, platinum and palladium — and not to plated goods, which have essentially none. Under the Hallmarking Act 1973 it is also an offence to describe or mark plated wares in a way that implies they are precious metal.

That last point has history behind it. Nineteenth-century platers marked their goods with shields, crowns, animals and letters in shaped surrounds — arrangements that read, at arm’s length, exactly like a hallmark. They are trade marks, not assay marks, and the way to tell is not to squint harder at the shapes but to ask a different question: is there a standard mark in the row? A lion passant, a Britannia, a millesimal number. If there is no standard mark, it is not hallmarked silver, whatever else is stamped beside it.

The quick sequence

1. Find the marks. Base, underside of a handle, inside a foot rim.
2. Look for a standard mark, not for “a hallmark”. No standard mark, no sterling.
3. Read any letters plainly. EPNS, EP, EPBM (electroplated Britannia metal), A1 — all plate.
4. Check the wear. Copper showing through means fused plate. Grey or yellow means electroplate. No colour change at all is a point towards solid.
5. Weigh it in your hand. Solid silver is noticeably dense for its size. This is the weakest of the tests and the one most often relied on, so treat it as a hint and not an answer.

A magnet is worth mentioning only to dismiss it. Silver is not magnetic — but neither is brass, copper, aluminium or nickel silver. A magnet rules out iron and steel and tells you nothing else.

What plate is worth

Less than people hope and more than nothing. Its value is not in the metal, because the plated layer cannot be economically recovered; it is in the object. A good maker, an unusual form, a complete service, real design quality — those sell. A worn Victorian tray with the copper showing through at every edge generally does not.

Which is a question about the market rather than about the metal, and the honest way to answer it is to look at what pieces like it have actually sold for — not at an asking price, and not at a guess. What an auction result actually says is about reading those numbers properly.