A company that helps conserve some of the world's most valuable artworks

has been awarded a royal warrant.

Willard may not be a big name in the art world but it has developed conservation techniques for more than 50 years.

The Chichester company is a leading supplier of specialist conservation equipment to the great galleries and museums of the world.

From Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Australian National Gallery in Canberra, Willard's client list reads like a directory of the world's leading galleries.

The company makes a huge range of specialised equipment, mostly custom-built.

This includes climate-controlled pressure tables to repair canvases and textiles and humidity cabinets, such as the one installed at the Bodleian in Oxford which enabled rare parchments to be read for the first time in hundreds of years.

There are studio easels, gluing jigs and specialised textile washing equipment, which was used to clean the tapestries damaged by smoke in the fires at Windsor Castle and Hampton Court Palace.

The company has also been involved in the restoration of paintings at Buckingham Palace and St James's Palace.

Demand for the its smaller tools, such as sensitive heated spatulas, used to repair a single strand of a 500-year-old fabric, or irons used to re-line delicate ancient canvasses, is growing fast.

Its latest spatula was developed when Paul Willard was visiting conservators at the Hamilton Kerr Institute at Cambridge University earlier this year.

They needed tear-mending and the prototype spatula was delivered for testing four months later.

The company was founded by Jack Willard in the Fifties. He is still actively involved, although his son Paul is now managing director.

Mr Willard senior ran an electrical engineering company in Chichester and one day a customer who was studying at the Courtauld Institute brought in a home-made heated spatula for repair.

Nothing could be done with it but Mr Willard said he would build a better one. That was the start of the firm's connection with the art world.

The company joins more than 800 other businesses listed as official suppliers to the Royal Household and will be allowed to display the royal coat of arms and the words "By Appointment to Her Majesty The Queen."