Thursday, 29 January 2009

In many communities, charity shops once performed an essential service providing access to cheap clothes, toys, furniture and books, recycling goods and offering somewhere to have a good rummage between jumble sales. These incidental social benefits of charity shops are now less apparent. Charity Shops are now often very slick operations focused on maximising income for charities such as Oxfam, Cancer Research, Scope and the British Heart Foundation. I was recently shocked to see a young mum humiliated in a shop for daring to request a discount, but rudeness apart there is absolutely nothing wrong with the new breed of charity shops. Except that our high streets are much poorer for the loss of traditional charity shops – and traditional pubs, butchers, greengrocers, etc.

Today, Jackie and I visited Bishop’s Stortford for no other reason than that neither of us can remember the last time we went there. Of course it has changed, and alongside the usual charity shops we found a great bookshop run for Sense. We bought a selection of books and then had tea at Marks and Spencers exchanging favourites from the collected poems of Philip Larkin: Days and Take One Home For The Kiddies.

We also found a charity shop run for the Isabel Hospice – these are amongst my favourite charity shops. This one was very traditional – so traditional that when we arrived five minutes before closing time, we found it already shut for the day.