Shopping

Bin bags of fun: (from left) Anne Marie, Tina and Olive in the Marie Curie shop

It’s 10am on a windy Tuesday morning and half a dozen people are already determindedly combing the rails of Highbury Corner’s branch of Marie Curie Cancer Care. While Capital Gold pumps out of the speakers, a steady stream of donators rush in, dumping bin bags full of cast-offs, and then hurry out again shouting apologies of ‘parked on a double yellow’. One furtive browser, having stashed her coat and bag in the corner, is approaching each rail with great reverence, carefully fingering every single item. ‘Out the back’ (technically ‘out the side’ in this case), the volunteers are finishing off a well-earned round of toast. There are no quiet days here, it turns out, although Mondays and Saturdays are busiest.

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This is one of London’s most successful charity shops, attracting some 52,000 customers a year and drawing a diverse bunch of bargain hunters from Holloway, Stoke Newington, Islington and beyond. On any given day, you’ll see a little old lady shopping alongside a young bloke in a suit while a mum negotiates her pushchair around the rails.

London’s 400-plus charity shops offer some of the city’s best bargains and treasure, from retro furniture, to rare vinyl and vintage clothes. The fusty image of outmoded tat, chipped crockery and clothes smelling of damp has gone; finding a treasure at the bottom of the £1 bargain bin is now a badge of shopping savvy. And while your money goes to a worthwhile cause, you’re also recycling. Statistics from Marie Curie Cancer Care, which operates 184 shops nationwide, claim that 8,000 items of clothing are sold in their shops each day and 120,000 bin bags of useable stock are donated each year in the UK. In the Highbury shop, sales in the last three years have gone up by 10 per cent.

In the shop’s sorting room, 60-year-old Anne Marie, manageress of eight years, is working with assistant manager Gloria and volunteers Olive and Tina, sifting through unwanted Christmas presents and the results of new year clear-outs. Among the pile is a large plastic dinosaur, a Mathmos projector light and a trio of nearly new saucepans.

The tiny, bright-eyed Olive has just returned from the little kitchen with mugs of tea and a tin of sugar-coated biscuits. I ask her how old she is. ‘21!’ she says, quick as a flash. Even quicker, Gloria pipes up from the corner, ‘Yeah, times four!’ They hoot with laughter. They’re just as tickled when I ask 73-year-old Tina where she lives. ‘Up Holloway,’ she says. ‘Pentonville, more like, eh Tina?’ says Olive.

Tina is ironing the clothes with an old stand-up steamer. ‘I’d love one of these at home – I could do my curtains. And the steam kills all the bacteria. Lovely.’ Despite the draught from constant interruptions, eightysomething Olive reckons it’s too hot. ‘Is that heater on? I should be stripped off! Now that’d be a sight… I’m past my sell-by-date, me.’ Olive travels here from Hackney Wick, where she used to work as a machinist and still lives in the house in which she was born. She’s been helping in the shop for about five years having previously worked in her local Age Concern shop.

Around the rest of the room, shelves are bursting with donations. ‘That bit down there,’ says Anne Marie, pointing down a short flight of stairs to a space filled with bin bags and rails of clothes, ‘used to be my office. We ran out of room and so they came and knocked out the partition walls.’