London thrift shops(charity shops)
 

Any suggestions for good ones?

There are plenty of OXFAM shops in London.

Maybe you'll find some of MK_2's old cast offs..ya think?

Crefloors, ROTFL!!!! You go girl!!!

By the way, are your ready for spring?
I sure am! Hope you haven't been too cold. Take good care. ((*))

There's an Oxfam shop on Kensington High Street. Turn left out of the tube, cross the street and it's down a bit.

I think there is also one or two on Kensington Church street.

Check out Street Sensations for a stroll down London streets

<b>www.streetsensation.co.uk</b>

Britain's charity shops are virtually all chains: the leaders, like Oxfam or Age Concern, have several hundred branches. They're all run as a mixture of centrally-managed ranging decisions (not everything they sell is donated to the branch concerned) and local happenstance, so you can't say any one is particularly good: the quality of what's on offer changes as unpredictably as our weather. However, those run by the Notting Hill Housing Trust always strike me as having particularly quirky and stylish stuff on offer.

If you like them, the trick isn't looking for a specific one: it's knowing how to find a good few in the same place. They congregate in places (practically always streets, as there are very few in malls) close to where there are a lot of people, but not so close as to command frightening rents. Most frequently, that'll be the old shopping street that's now been bypassed by some new development.

By definition, there are very few such locations in central London, where virtually all shopping streets command full rents. There are a few round Kensington as Kay says (includin a Notting Hill Housing one a few hundred yards up Ken Church St, and I think there are even more if you keep going west along Ken High St past the Commonwealth Institute) and a similar sprinkling just off the main shopping street of all the main residential villages just outside the centre, like Camden Town. The further out you go, the more there are.

But there is of course a web-based locator tool. Put your postcode into http://cgi.charityshops.plus.com/locator.php

Going to suburbs like Hendon or Ilford, where these shops are at their densest, isn't often convenient for tourists. The charity shop quarter of smaller towns - like Brighton - is usually a great deal closer to the centre than is the case in London, and you might find better pickings on a day trip to places like Bath.

For another day-trp possiblity - Oxford has a few good ones right in the town centre.

But in London - as the others say, the best ones I know of are in Kensington.

One interesting thing if you like books is that Oxfam has become a major second-hand bookseller. In some places there will whole Oxfam shops dedicated to books. Others will specialise in things like vintage clothing.

There's an Oxfam shop finder at http://www.multimap.com/clients/plac...?client=oxfam3
Flanner makes a good point about where charity shops are located. You often get several in the same area. If there's a branch of Oxfam, it's likely that there'll be at least one other charity shop nearby.