Calling all hunters and collectors, rummagers and moochers...here's a totally biassed and subjective update on the best London charity shops for book-lovers

One of the surprisingly few charity shops in Brixton is also one of the best in London - especially for lovers of music and
vintage clothes. This shop is so popular it's given its name to the junction of Brixton High Street and Stockwell Road - now
unofficially Barnado's Corner.

Sorry – four and a half years late, here's the promised update of an early Microgroove posting, Charity shop pecking order for the hopeless bibliomane, from March 2014.

Half a decade has not radically changed the London charity shops scene. Shops have opened and closed, the charities have become more professional (not always good news for the punters) and - given the aftershocks of the recession and Brexit vote, the nature of donations has changed. Maybe people are hanging on to their stuff a little longer, but for sure there are more people out there desperately looking for good cheap clothes, and the bargains keep on coming.

And for the most part they all still welcome ancient moochers like myself (Have to thank novelist Howard Jacobson for this word, as explained in his BBC Radio 4 Point of View programme, In Praise of Mooching).

Anyway, here's another totally subjective review of the charity shop scene in the areas I have happily mooched around in the past year or so, as of autumn 2018.

 I'm still visiting the same old shops, but have also gone further afield, rummaging through the cast off books, CDs, jackets and coffee-mugs of neighbourhoods as far-flung as Forest Hill,  Blackheath, East Dulwich, Streatham, Tooting, and even up north to Highgate,  Hampstead, Finsbury Park, Upper Street, Dalston, Kilburn High Road, and beyond. Does such a beyond exist? Good question. Charity shops in the outer suburbs and the Home Counties is a whole different subject, which I might (but probably won't) return to one day.

Some good new finds included the British Heart Foundation Books and Music shop at 94 Streatham High Road. This shop immediately makes anyone used to old-fashioned secondhand book and record shops at home. It's packed with stuff: give yourself and hour or two to do it justice.

It's not far from one of the biggest Oxfam shops in South London, on the other side of the suburban motorway aka the A23 Brighton Road. It's maybe a personal thing but I find those massive Oxfams (the one in Kingsland Road, another in Tooting) almost too much of a good thing.

Streatham High Road is a bit of a charity shop nirvana, with samples of all the main names popping up along its seemingly never-ending length. These shops are fed by the young families inhabiting the vast areas of residential streets surrounding it, and the quality of the gear is good. There's also a healthy traffic on these pavements so bargains go quickly. Yet, fine as many of these shops seemed, there was not one that stood out or made it to any notional, personal top ten.

Fabulous, imaginative, topical window displays are a
feature of all the best charity shops, but few
beat this one at Barnado's in Brixton

Two miles further north, however,  on the same arterial road, in central Brixton, there's a real gem.

Surprisingly, this stretch has only one charity shop - but what a shop!

Brixton's Barnado's shop  entered this entirely subjective, incomplete and unfair Top Ten all those years back, at number 10.

The big news is that this same shop has now soared to the Number One spot, knocking that old favourite,  Clapham High Street's Save the Children store, into a very close second place.

Barnados was always good, but last year it re-branded itself as a music specialist shop, and there's certainly a lot of interesting material there for lovers of alternative, reggae, Jazz, folk, dance and generally left field music, vinyl and CD, as you'd expect in this area, and in a shop opposite the Brixton Academy.

It's also good for secondhand guitars, drums, musical instruments of all types and PA equipment: but when they come in, they go very, very fast!

This shop has provided me with several favourite jackets and shirts. I still curse myself for not snapping up the beautiful old Super 8 movie camera in a leather case I saw there a few months ago. The shop has always provided good, often unusual bargains: eg, brand new XXXL string vests in Rasta colours, old film cameras, typewriters and other curios. Plus, friendly and helpful staff.

A new entrant takes the number three spot, despite being very small: the delightful Children of the Mekong shop which opened in Lavender Hill last year. Good quality clothes, good value books, CDs and DVDs, and some nice Vietnamese craftwork gifts.

With its regular sales and attractive window displays, this is a friendly shop run chiefly, it seems, by French and Vietnamese volunteers. Just recently, they seem to have reduced the book stock, which if it's a deliberate change is a shame....but even so I'm giving this small local contender a high placing in my latest, ridiculously subjective league table of charity shops within a 30-minute bike or tube ride from my home. The fact this shop is only three minute's walk is perhaps a factor. Unfair or what? But the staff are delightful.

Another newcomer is at number 4. Well, sort of new, in the sense that this is awarded to two shops - the original store in Battersea Park Road run by the Wandsworth HIV awareness charity Oasis (now just one shop, the clothes and furniture stores having merged), and its big new sibling in Clapham Old Town.

The Battersea Park Road shop is thankfully just as old-school as it always was - a big, quite gloomy shop with masses of books, CDs, toys (including, on one visit, some very scary china dolls), glass, pots and pans, bric-a-brac of all sorts. It's like something out of a non-existent Angela Carter short story.

This new OASIS shop in Clapham is big and cheerful, occupying the site of a former rather pricey fashion store in the Polygon area of Clapham Old Town (one of the poshest parts of SW4, it must be said - so much the better).

It's a magnificent shop on three floors, including a whole room of books. I popped in to check it out a few weeks ago and emerged about 90 minutes later with a bagful of books. If it caries on like this for a while, this store will be a contender for my personal number one.

The big MIND shop on Wandsworth Road can remain in its comfortable 5th place, if I can combine it with another MIND shop I've come to like in Highgate.

The SW8 store is a busy and truly cheerful shop crammed with stuff, close to the big 1920s Larkhall Estate. It's also not far from the new Nine Elms luxury flat developments: maybe they'll get some new customers!

The shop has always been good for the occasional surprise bargain, such as a set of lovely Italian Bialetti Moka coffee makers and interesting books and DVDs. It also seems very good for kids' stuff, clothes, toys, books, etc.

It now happily shares the slot with another excellent MIND shop, the double-fronted one on Archway Road opposite Highgate tube station. It's perhaps stretching the 30 minutes travel limit, unless you're very lucky with the Northern Line. This is a double dose of charity shop goodness: clothes and bric a brac in the first shop, books, CDs and records in the knocked-through next door shop.

In the original poll, the FARA shops in Northcote Road, Gloucester Road, Battersea Park Road and Balham scored well, and they continue to do so. The Northcote Road shops is especially good for designery casual menswear - presumably cast offs from all the well-heeled yummy young dads in this Nappy Valley district. Also, good for picture frames, lampshades, luggage, mirrors, ...oh, everything, even the occasional guitar. The Gloucester Road branch has a similarly delightful basement, and the clothes are seriously upmarket but NOT overpriced.

FARA has a slightly less posh and gloriously dark shop with a big menswear and book basement in Pimlico, with another branch selling retro Vintage clothing just around the corner in Tatchbrook Street. So FARA earns a good number 6 slot, and could easily return to a higher slot!

But none of them has served up the occasional brilliant bargain or surprising little treasure that they were so good at three years ago. So FARA shops stay where they were, in the upper to middle region of the chart. There's one in Earlsfield which is also worth a visit. They are certainly some of the most aesthetically pleasing shops to visit: all their staff seem to have some genius o for making a great display out of whatever arrives in the donation bags.

The Oxfam Bookshop in Portobello Road - great for art books,
classics, languages,  jazz and classical records, CDs, DVDs

Moving South East, I'm still giving plenty of points to the Herne Hill Oxfams. The general store nearly always has excellent music (often plenty of 60s and 70s vinyl) and recently has been good for men's clothes. The shop has that good feel you get only from the care of a regular team of long-serving staff.

Just over the road is a fine example of Oxfam's specialist bookshops. This one has very good art, Classics, history and general fiction sections. It's got a real bookshop feel, and the staff are usually very helpful.

There's another thing about these shops that annoys me: their idea of a "Cult Literature" section. This immediately begs the question, what is cult fiction? Who decides that Vladimir Nabokov or  JG Ballard or Angela Carter are cult rather than mainstream? Herman Hesse is a sort of blameless king of the cult novels, dating back to the days when he was "re-discovered" by the hippies, and read alongside Carlos Castenada, Tolkien,  and that stuff about Ley Lines and alien land artists.

And yet DH Lawrence - another big cult-like following there - is nearly always given Modern Classic status.

So, it is subjective. Why split them this way? Of course Oxfam is not the real guilty party here: they're following the lead of many highly respected dealers.

The Oxfam Book Shops in Balham and Portobello Road are consistently good as well; I've scored many fine art books in these shops, although the £2.99 flat rate for paperback novels sometimes seems a bit steep.

And these Oxfam bookshops really are great, they take such care to categorise and display their books in pleasing ways, they encourage browsing and even loitering. Their biggest shop, in Upper Street, Islington, is a marvel. I've kept it out of the chart only for the reason that it's not a general charity shop.

World's End, Chelsea and Pimlico are further charity shop hotspots, each with a good Oxfam. In the West End, both the Goodge Street and Drury Lane Oxfam branches are worth a serious browse.

Strange to say, in all those wanderings, I've yet to find a shop that's significantly better than the best shops in the SW2, 4, 8 and 11 postcodes. This corner, inner south-west London, is blessed with the variety of its charity shops.

One chain that started in this area, supporting Trinity Hospice on Clapham Common, has grown and also added "Royal" to its name - at the same time concentrating even more on upmarket clothing with prices to match.

Some of the new stores, such as the one in St John's Road, Clapham Junction, have no books or music. If you're after Hugo Boss seconds, this is the place for you. There's a newish one in Camberwell, in that 60s shopping arcade next to Morrisons, which has a good feel, and the old Clapham High Street branch is as good and diverse as it ever was, with plenty of good book and  music bargains.

But overall their move towards high-end clothing does nothing for me, and it's sad to see that once marvellous book and music shop in Kensington Church Street is now serving as overspill for the adjacent clothes shop. Then again, I know what a briliant place the Hospice is: and I know that these shops exist only to provide as much funding as possible to keep it going. Maybe it's a change in society, or the changes in media technology - but there's clearly more profit to be made form clothes and shoes and accessories than from books, records and CDs.

SW4 has some good and surprising one-off shops supporting local charities.  One well-established shop is the Ace of Clubs homeless charity shop at 8 Clapham Park Road, just round the corner from Clapham Common tube station. It has plenty of books and the higgledy-piggledy feel of a true charity shop, the sort of place you sense you might unearth a true gem, if only you look a little harder.

There's also a long-established shop by Clapham North tube run by the well-being charity Green Light London which is good for clothes and new age stuff, crystals and joss-sticks as well as occasional book and DVD bargains. Great that it's still surviving, like dipping back into the 70s each time you visit.

Like I said, this "league table" is totally personal,  and in fact bonkers - what you have for realise is that any charity shop anywhere win the country could suddenly become number one, the moment some kindly soul drops of a couple of sacks of old Penguin Classics and their late uncle's 1960/70s vinyl collection.

But actually it takes a lot more than this to create a really good shop, charity or otherwise. As soon as you enter Barnados of Brixton and Save the Children  in Clapham, you detect the presence of a good, caring, imaginative and original management team. There's often good music playing, and the shelves and rails are tidied and  restocked regularly. There is space to look and browse.

There are some equally promising looking shops - I won't name them, but one is in Tooting, an even bigger one in Dalston, and a third in Streatham - that should be great but almost overwhelm you with the volume of  stuff. And then depress you when you realise you've already looked through most it, a few weeks back. Other shops - such as the big national BHF chain - often have excellent stock. Yet they all seem to follow the same shopfloor layout which means you have to squeeze through narrow gaps between clothes racks before you reach the books and other stuff.  I don't mind clutter, but this seems to be deliberately planned clutter, just like the way Debenhams puts a maze of perfume and cosmetics counters between the entrance and the stuff you want to look at.

The Chase: Clapham's street of no shame

Each day I come home across the northern corner of Clapham Common, then turn right into my street.

Over the road are the beautiful walled gardens of Trinity Hospice, wonderful at any time of year, but especially so in spring, with its abundant wisteria and blossoming trees. This hospice - rightly venerated across the city - still operates according to the policies of its founders, that is - offering a place to anyone i need within its catchment area, regardless of anything else, wealth included.

If only the rest of this street, my street, where I have lived since 1985, could adhere to such policies.

Up on the wall to your left as you turn the corner from Northside into The Chase are two plaques.  Not genuine blue plaques denoting former residents of historical significance. No, these are a less impressive blue, one mid-blue, one dark, but they are not the real thing, not real London Blue Plaques.

Instead,  they are privatised plaques, essentially boasts, commemorating two street parties held in this road, one for the queen's 60th anniversary of accession to the throne,  possibly, and the other for the royal family wedding, a year or so later.

I can't remember the exact dates but I do remember the rather off-putting invitations, stuffed through our front doors back then. They invited us all to join in honouring said royals at "street parties".

 The Chase would be closed to traffic and the residents were invited to buy tickets for a feast in honour of, well I suppose the Queen herself, and ... I can''t remember who the others were - possibly Charles' son's wedding to Ms K. Middleton?

I have no interest in  England's royal family. They seem in some cases to be rather silly, annoying people, I am never sure why they are given the opportunity to comment so often. I do not generally believe them when they speak, it seems like they are actors, voicing someone else's lines.

 I'm sure they'd have similar or even stronger feelings about me. You can't really hate them, they are too bland.  The ones I loathe are the media arse-lickers who seem to think we all want them to plaster photos of these dreary folk all over the front pages of newspapers, and all over every TV news bulletin.

So, I have to admit, it rather annoys me every day, seeing these plaques commemorating these events which gave a few well-heeled households in this street the chance to advertise their patriotism and their connections and their good taste in catering to each other. It is still, in this country, a matter of who you know, or worse still, where you went to school or university.

But why did they have to stick these plates on the wall? It is the equivalent of me putting huge photos of Castro or Che Guevara or even poor old Ken Livingstone over my windows.

I wish I had a similar wall onto which I could screw plaques reflecting my own political views. Living on the top floor of a decaying chunk of jerry-built housing - one the luftwaffe should have put out of its misery, but narrowly missed - I do not.

I wish I had had the nerve to organise a street party  to mark the 25th anniversary of the death of this street's one truly great recent resident, Angela Carter. That might be something good: but I'm sure her many friends and fans and family me members will do something good, in 2017, for this great author.

It happens that there is a genuine Blue Plaque on a house in this street, directly opposite where I live. It marks the spot where the Japanese novelist, Natsume Soseki, spent a couple of extremely unhappy and uncomfortable years in London in a miserable Clapham boarding house. That house is now worth approximately £2.5 million. Or perhaps much more...

I doubt if many people will visit this part of Clapham to see where some wealthy residents glugged a lot of champagne in honour of the royals on those days. By contrast, almost every day through the summer, taxis and minibuses stop outside 80 The Chase to disgorge Japansese tourists, young and old, here to pay tribute to Japan's answer to Dickens or Henry James, and to visit the small museum in the flat at no 80b.

Maybe a Japanese themed street party would tick all our boxes?

Meanwhile, another "only in The Chase" sighting today - one of those home-made posters asking people to pick up their dog's shit. Only in this case, it came with a bag of Bob Marten's poo-bags, just in case the shames owners had forgotten to bring their own.

Hurrah!

When a novel sucks you in

If you read much recent fiction you'll sometimes get that feeling that - yes, that is exactly right, I have been there, this is precisely how I felt, I know this place, I know these people.

It first happened when I was reading  Geoff Dyer's autobiographical novel The Colour of Memory.
There's a bit where he's describing a sunset over Acre Lane, Brixton, and I imagined myself cycling in the opposite direction, from Clapham and into that exciting exotic world that so many of us wanted to inhabit, back then in the early 1980s.

That was a book that was making me kick myself every other page - why hadn't I written this, or something like it?


Reading John Lanchester's London blockbuster, Capital, I'm getting even more hyperlocal vibrations, in fact at times I feel like I am trapped inside the book. The sensation is there in a way that it is not in many other novels based partly or wholly in this part of south London, simply because he makes it clear exactly where most of the action is happening. And most of it is within a quarter mile of where I am sitting now.

With its cast of multi-ethnic characters - from the posh white Anglo-Saxon bankers to the Polish builders, the Hungarian nanny, the Pakistani shop-keepers, the Zimbabwean refugee traffic warden - this novel could seem a little too obvious.

It has one of those spiralling or tessellated plots, with a fragment of one plot line laid down on top of the part of a previous one, building up to some strong false climaxes. It's based around such stock London subjects as greedy city types getting their comeuppances in the 2008 crash, mistaken arrests of Asians  under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, Banksy-style street art pranks, car parking, the curious world of premier league footballers and their managers, etc.

So yes, it is a bit clichéd - and you can find similar cast-sheets in the big London novels of the past decade , including two Zadie Smiths, one Alan Hollinghurst,  Blake Morrison's South of the River , etc -- but its got a lovely rolling plot-line that keeps you reading.

Though perhaps if you're not a Clapham resident the urge to read on to find out exactly which street Pepys road is based on will be lacking. The amount of research Lanchester must have undertaken is impressive - or perhaps he just lives here. He must have visited the hospice up the road (Trinity Hospice) and its sister church on the Common, Holy Trinity.

He gets most things absolutely right; maybe it's stretching it a bit to suggest a 17-year-old Senegalese football prodigy would relax by listening to Fela Kuti, but then again, why not - his dad might have introduced him to the Black President way back.

It's odd how these patches of the city have been so thoroughly trampled over by writers, though. The Common is a character here just as it is in Green's End of the Affair or Nell Dunn's Up The Junction.
You start thinking about what book Penelope Fitzgerald must have been writing in her study in Alma Road while Angela Carter was blending Clapham and Camberwell for her magic toyshop. Clapham often features as the low-point residence in a number of writers' ;lives - Sylvia Plath, Greene, Natsumi Soseki - and it is certainly no longer offers much in the way of a hospitable climate for the impoverished literary exile.

Just plenty of juicy and venal subject matter for highly clued-up writer-reporters like John Lanchester.

In (reluctant) defence of Clapham

Murder on the Common: some of my best SW4 friends are crows. 

Heartily in agreement with all the Crap Towns stuff about how awful London is published earlier this week (See Daily Mail, etc). But a much better demolition job on the capital can be found on the Vice magazine website.

Not only did this say everything we all hate about London in a far cleverer,  funnier way than I could ever have managed - it also distilled another of my feelings: that if London is the worst place in the UK - no, the world - then Clapham is definitely the worst place to live in London.

So these days, when I say I live in Clapham (and sometimes I even lie and say I live  sort of in Stockwell/Vauxhall/Battersea borders) - I find myself adding things like, well it 's very convenient for transport or, well when I moved here it was still quite bohemian - etc.

Because all the things  in that Vice piece are true - especially the bit saying that, above all, what makes Clapham so, so ghastly is the people.

Not just the banker families with their SUVs parked nose-to-nose in Lilieshall Road, nor the scrubbed infants being dragged to the private schools on the common by their nannies, not just the stupid city boys renting their £600 a week shitty flats in identikit new build blocks on "Wingate Square",  not just the perfectly-formed gaggles of posh girls jogging and braying in their lustrous pink lycra, not just the shouty ex-squaddies running their profitable boot camps on the Common, not just the posh middle aged ladies with their three or four pedigree dogs moaning about their East European workmen....no, there are loads of other ghastly types living in this once unremarkable and now totally insufferable suburb.

But - and god I know hard this can be - we should remember these appalling characters are merely the most noticeable stratum of the local population, not the whole lot of us. These people are like the vile skin on a rich custard.  But I would also like you to believe that, crushed beneath this foul layer are  many perfectly good people who are indeed in need of your sympathy.

But not too much sympathy, because the area is in fact not too bad to live in, once you learn how to filter out or avoid the above-mentioned annoyances.

So here goes,  here are 10 not quite so awful things which perhaps make it possible to live in Clapham, all the above notwithstanding:

1. The charity shops, including a great Save the Children shop  near Clapham North tube, the FARA shops in Northcote Road and Lavender Hill, and the four Trinity Hospice charity shops. The latter vary greatly reflecting the social mix of their locales - cheap and cheerful on the High Street, a bit posh and pricey in Old Town, yummy mummy-rugby daddy in Northcote Road, and a wee bit Up the Junction on Lavender Hill.

2. Rectory Grove/ Rectory Gardens -  the last of the Clapham's old bohemian residentsfight repeated attempts by Lambeth council to evict them. Do read this brilliant entry on the Faded London blog, and especially the fascinating comments by jakartaass etc. See also some amazing photos on Sam C.'s Mixbook
of life in this tiny L-shaped street of early 19th century cottages. Arriving as squatters in the early 1970s, they gained short-life housing tencies from Lambeth, but are having to fight for their survival here as the stench of fat fat profits insinuates its way in the nostrils of their local authority landlords.

3. Clapham Common itself - a great place to get mugged on, to be gay-bashed on whether you are gay or not, to to be hit in the face by rugby balls and frisbees, to tread in dog shit, to be barged out of the way by joggers or shouted at by cyclists. Oh yes, that's just the start of it.
Still a nice place to lie down on and undress on a hot, a rare hot day. And it is home to some of Clapham's least offensive residents - a fine murder of crows.

4. The Clapham Sect  - the group of wealthy Christians who drove the movement for the abolition of slavery in the late 18th century used Clapham's Holy Trinity church as a base. They were also not great believers in alcohol, which is apparently explains the lack of pubs in many of the area's oldest residential areas.

5. Vivienne Westwood: apparently she still lives here, and has always said how much she likes Clapham, unlike so many famous people who once they make it get out. Wonder if Thunderclap Newman still breathes the air of SW4?

6. The new Clapham library: after years of expecting the worst, many of Clapham Public library users agree that the new building, inspired by the spiral-ramp design of the Guggenheim Museum in NYC, is
actually rather good. Andrew Logan's installation of broken mirrors and  bric-a-brac is also popular.
Another possibly good thing to come out of this is the  new Omnibus  community arts venutre being created in the old Library building on Clapham Common Northside.

Andrew Logan's mirror-mosaic-bric-a-brac
 sculptures outside the new Clapham
Public Library

7. Transport:  good that it has three tube stations, shame that they are all on the Northern Line. Buses are good and trains from the Juntion to anywhere in the universe - unless you want to get to Clapham High Street.

8. Angela Carter, Natsume Soseki, Graham Greene, etc, lived in Clapham for a while. OK, they are all dead and at least one of them hated living in Clapham - but at least the place has some literary connections. Amazing how often it appears in novels as the default place for lonely, failing types to live in bedsits, in the early 1960s.

9. Which leads straight on to Trinity Hospice  itself - the oldest hospice in the UK, and occupying a beautiful house  with even more beautiful gardens on the north side of the Common - which might seem more like a good reason, not  so much to live in Clapham, but to die there.

10. Finally, perhaps the best thing of all about this place - it's only about 10 minutes away from Brixton.