Charity shops
 

I am looking for the locations of Charity shops in London. Found several in Scotland and would like to continue shopping them in London for my month stay. I have always enjoyed shopping these type stores (thrift stores, etc..) in the US and would like to do so in the UK. If it helps or if anyone cares, I am staying on Stamford Street.
Thanks.

hi jen,

Oh...I can finally answer this question. I was looking myself because I am a bookhunter and just found out for my trip in october that a chain of charity shops called "oxfam" is all over london and suburbs.

they have a site online that will help you locate all the stores. They also have speciality bookshops called "oxfam books" that sell nothing but books.

To locate oxfam stores near you or where ever go to this site:

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/shops/find.html

another site listing all and giving map is:

http://www.upmystreet.com/nrs/?l1=london&cat=410

hope this helps!

Other charities that have shops I can recall seeing recently in London include:

Age Concern
or
Help The Aged (I can't remember which but one of the two if not both)

Imperial Cancer Research Fund (I think this might have merged with another British Cancer charity recently which also had shops)

Scope

Sue Ryder

See http://users.ox.ac.uk/~econec/shops.html for locations of some of these.

Also this site may help too:

http://cgi.charityshops.plus.com/locator.php

There's a website upmystreet.com that covers the UK. If you put your postal code in the search, you can find all sorts of shops & services in the area including charity shops.

Oxfam is a large chain of charity shops. They have a shop Oxfam Originals at Ganton St in Soho that sells 60s & 70s retro fashion.

The Notting Hill Neighborhood Association is another one that I've heard is good.

Camden Market on weekends is a popular place for second hand clothes. Car boot sales are another popular weekend pastime for bargains.

The phone book is very useful, too. I spent a couple of days doing just that - visiting all the charity shops listed in the phone book. It's a great way to see some fun neighborhoods.

If you're in St. John's Wood check out the oxfam (I think) in the High st. Because it is such an upmarket suburb they have wonderful stuff in the store. St. John's Wood is also nice to wonder around and there are some great small clothing and shoe stores.

At Selfridges in Oxford Street, and in many of the charity shops themselves, there is a book called "Bargain Hunter's London". It lists charity shops, and other bargains, by neighborhood and has maps.

I LOVE charity shops, especially when buying clothes for my fast-growing toddler. He always looks very well dressed, and I spend a fraction of what I would pay if I bought retail.

The charity shops I frequent are as follows:

--St Michael's Hospice (I think that's a local one, probably not national?)
--British Heart Foundation
--Oxfam
--Save The Children
--Age Concern
--Scope
--Help the Aged (different from Age Concern)
--Imperial Cancer Research Fund
--Sue Ryder

And if that's not enough, check the following website for a list of members of The Association of Charity Shops. There are TONS more that I haven't even heard of, and I think many of them are local or regional shops. The underlined ones link to specific charity websites, so you can look up locations throughout the UK:

http://fp.charityshops.plus.com/members.html

LOL Kavey....I just saw your post. I guess we were looking at the same site.

Yeah! I wrote a short list and then figured there must be a list on the web somewhere so I googled it and then took out the ones I didn't recognise!!!!!

Can I add to the list The Cats Protection shops? I work as a volunteer in our local one, in Maidstone Kent, and we price our items very reasonably :)

You might look at this a slightly different way.

Charity shops are in locations with lower rents where for-profit shops don't want to be. These are in places that have lost pedestrian shoppers in the past two decades, normally to out-of-town stores. There are very few such locations in tourist Central London: St John's Wood probably is the closest (though if you're in Stamford Street by Blackfriars, a mile schlep south to the Elephant & Castle shopping precinct will throw up a lot)

But you'll find loads of charity shops a few yards away from the centre of the suburban shopping centres that most visitors see as signpost signs on the way in: Chiswick, Hammersmith and the like.
Visit anywhere outside central London, and there's a charity shop ghetto at the end of the main shopping street or in a street that runs parallel with it. Or if a superstore has opened recently, charity shops may have begun to take over all the "traditional" shopping space.

If you're a real charity shop addict, you'll quickly get a nose for finding them, especially in places like Brighton.

And my phrase "lower rent" has nothing to do with the US phrase "low-rent". All of Britain outside central London has swathes of underused retail space which is neither tacky nor dangerous. The charity shop ghettoes also harbour some of our quirkier independent shops. And almost no tourists.

The best website to find charity shops in the UK is at http://ccgi.charityshops.org.uk or www.charityshops.org.uk