Don’t expect to be greeted warmly. No no, you’ll get a sneer that’s for sure – “don’t knick anything as I can’t be bothered to keep an eye you” from the store assistant (no doubt called India….Indiyaaaah um… seriously, someone named you that? I don’t think so). Obviously The Retro Exchange is used to people [...]

Now this is one hell of a jam-packed junk shop, things piled to the ceiling, be careful, don’t touch anything, it’s likely to come crashing down ontop of you. This is where you will find a crazed old local buying used towels or some such oddity, I found a big lightbulb with the word LOVE [...]

You can truly find the best shops in the most random places and Howie and Bell is one. I’m not quite sure whether to put it in Antique Shops or Vintage clothes as it has probably the best and most nicely edited selection of pieces I’ve yet to see but then again it has even [...]

Now here is a collection of weird shit. So taxidermy and monkey skulls I get, but Labrador’s testicles in jars? It’s hard not to like it here, I mean there aren’t many places where you hear the staff shout, “the ocelot fur coats are in the kid’s coffin under the mortuary table in the back [...]

Le Grenier appears to be the official retailer of 70’s Crockery. Full sets of brown and orange tea cups, sugar pots and tea jars interspersed with eclectic jewellery, retro furniture, exciting knick knacks and old record players in suitcases which are pretty useless but look cool. This shop probably survives in large part to people [...]

Easily my favourite ‘junk shop’ in London. Beedell Coram is stocked full of Victorian paintings, taxidermy, antique furniture, books, postcards and old medicine jars all lovingly displayed with no order or thought to presentation whatsoever. When she’s not drunk in the Golden Hart pub next door this is where ?????* collects her miniature tea sets, [...]

Located on Church Street, home to a scummy street market and a bunch of really high-end antique shops is Alfies Antiques Market, the largest antique arcade in the country. A vast cavern of Antique shops, several stories high, with over a hundred vendors inside specialising in everything from Victorian jewellery to vintage lace, antique paintings, [...]

This is the kind of place I’d recommend if you were looking for something random like say, a dressmakers dummy or an antique mousetrap. It’s effectively a junk shop but really well organised and edited to only the best stuff without charging a fortune for it. Needless to say they always have vast amounts of [...]

Tucked behind Upper Street, Pierrepont Arcade is a collection of little shoebox-sized antique and vintage shops. Tiny but stocked to the rafters. I always come across something to take up space in my closet that I will never actually wear, be it a Barbie themed charm bracelet or a mirrored waistcoat to go with my [...]

You’d be forgiven for thinking that either Les Couilles du Chiens or Ollie are cheap, as everything, be it animal trophies, Victorian taxidermy, bevelled antique mirrors, worn out school science lab work benches, poison bottles, old fashioned wooden clothes mannequins and stacks of rusty tins are just casually thrown together. I imagine that’s because there [...]