Why the British love charity shops

In Mary McCarthy’s 1954 novel The Group, Mr Andrews describes the contents of a charity shop (or thrift store if you hail from the States) as an ‘instructive inventory of the passé’. And indeed, all charity shops are repositories of the recent past – a perfect distillation of expended trends and fashions. Worthy of an anthropologist’s eye, charity shops are living museums; rail after rail of cultural history infused with the faint smell of other people’s washing detergent and mothballs. But Mr Andrews missed one vital point: charity shops are not simply about the past. They are also caverns of possibility, where formerly prized objects become affordable, and where the taste of the customer reins supreme.

There is no type of shop quite like it. As a novelist’s daughter, I have spent a great many hours waiting for my mother to finish leafing through the bookshelves of the Oxfam bookshop on Turl Street and the hot sting of shame when one of her novels was discovered priced at 10p. 

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Fast forward thirty years and my own daughter can attest to the many hours she has been forced to spend in charity shops while I rummage through rails of clothes and shelves of books, promising her a toy from the children’s shelf for good behaviour.