Rachel Streather creates guide to secondhand shops

Nov 3 2009 by Amy Hunt, The Journal

CANNY shoppers can pick up a unique green guide to secondhand chic in Tyne and Wear.

Rachel Streather from Heaton, Newcastle, has created her own home-made guide to 150 secondhand shops accessible by Metro. Her aim was to celebrate everything great about charity shops and encourage others to help the environment by promoting public transport.

Rachel toured charity, junk and secondhand shops around Tyne and Wear as part of her green mission.

She typed out her reviews of all the shops she visited on a typewriter she bought for a fiver in a charity shop and illustrated it with photographs and hand-drawn maps.

All the pages were photocopied and stapled together with a long-armed stapler she borrowed from a friend.

Although full of affection for genuine junk shops and secondhand shops, Rachel is not always complimentary about the shops’ layout, service or stock.

She said: “I’ve always gone to secondhand shops and over the last few years I’ve got increasingly fed up with how much they are charging.

“You see them charging £3 for a T-shirt from Primark when it was only about £1 in the shop. I’ve also seen Ikea furniture being sold for a higher price.

“All the bigger ones have become like chains and all look the same, as if they are trying to emulate high-street shops.

“I think they are forgetting why they were originally there, to provide clothes and goods for people who haven’t got much money themselves. I felt like some of them are ripping people off.

“So instead of just going round the shops complaining to myself I decided to do something about it, which was to let other people know there are lots of good secondhand shops out there.

“I decided to do it around public transport. To make it really thorough I went to every Metro stop on the system, I wanted it to be within a 10-minute radius of the Metro station, and I found all the shops that were independent.

“I buy secondhand because there’s already a lot of new stuff in the world. Going secondhand clothes shopping means you’re not going to be looking at the same old things.

“I wanted it to be a useful guide, giving people a map they could take with them. People have told me they like it – I’ve had a lovely reaction to it.”

When she lost her job unexpectedly last year Rachel started making things as gifts using items she found or was given.

She used wood she found in the backlanes of Heaton to make a toy for her grandson, teaching herself to use a jigsaw.

And she used fabric given to her by friends to make fabric cards and embroidered pictures.

She said: “I make things with whatever I find or is given to me and give them away as gifts.”