Vintage Shops in the North
Charlotte RowlandWhen it comes to vintage shopping, browsing is key, and these stores, included for their wealth of paraphernalia as well as their individual keen eye for quality goods, know it. Some are spacious and minimal, but more often, they are havens of trinkets, treasures and tiny collectables, crammed into nooks and crannies, like at Vintage Village Stockport, or, spreading outdoors, as at The Makers Market, Northern Quarter. You’re asked, indirectly, to have a good rummage, getting hands-on with what could be your next wardrobe piece or antique. Not knowing what you could find is the fun of it, and, whether you leave loaded with an array of bits and pieces you didn’t know you needed, or empty-handed, you will feel that sense of having supported a tradition regardless, with many of these shops invested in retaining the reusability of individual items in particular.
They say what goes around comes around and, as far as vintage goes, it certainly, for better or worse, does. The other layer to shopping in shops like these, including Walk the Line Vintage, Nantwich, Thrifty Store, Sheffield and Blue Rinse, Leeds, is the satisfaction of knowing you’ve recycled an object which already has a story, adding to its history merely by picking it up. If you’ve never buried yourself in a second-hand bookstore and flicked through the hardbacks to find dedications and love notes scrawled into the front pages from fifty years ago, you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s things like this that add real sentiment to a practical good, and remind us of the community we are part of, and what the act of buying, giving and receiving is really about. That’s what the shops gathered here cap on, with each knowing, in their own way, the true value of their product, and how to extend and prolong that within the realms of their own new, curated, modern-day spaces.
