Settlement Shop

I love trawling round charity shops on a Saturday afternoon seeking hidden treasures whether it be books, clothes, board games or records. The Settlement Shop has to be my favourite in Sutton town centre. The stock is of a high quality, the shop is well laid out with plenty of space to move and the prices are great. If you’re after glassware then pay a visit here as they have a massive selection and there’s one sprightly shall we say mature lady volunteer who I swear her only job here is to polish the glasses and arrange them as every time I come in here she has a wine glass or tankard and a duster in her hands! She is very friendly and chatty and nice to have a natter to as you’re perusing the shelves.
However the book section is my favourite part of the shop. A lot of charity shops tend to dump their books on the shelves without any sort of categorisation. They know their alphabet here and they have sections e.g. Cookery, Biography etc. I love coming here for a browse to see what they’ve had in. Their classics section is usually where I head first. I don’t think I’ve ever paid more than £1.50 for a paperback book in here. They’ve recently introduced a bargain section in boxes on the tables in the book department for the battered/​well loved books which you can usually pick up for 20p I recently bagged a copy of The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole for less than the price of some daily newspapers!
One of the other parts I particularly like in this shop is the decent selection of costume jewellery they have displayed in the counter. I have purchased several brooches from here each were under £5, if I’d got them from a Vintage Shop I’d have been paying at least £6 or £7 each for them.

Say what you like about them, there’s something great about a good charity shop. I don’t necessarily mean good as in tidy, or even with good stuff in. It’s more about a vibe, an ambience. It’s possibly the sort of ambience that thrift shops and crap ‘vintage’ shops try and give off; but that’s the problem: They try and put across that kind of atmosphere. The best thing about the best charity shops is they don’t try.
Wait, no. The best thing about charity shops is that no-​one bothers you in them. There’s no grinning, false tosspot with a ‘customer journey-​ladder’ (or similarly ridiculous implement) shoved up their backside, trying to get you to buy stuff. Personally, if I go in a charity shop that doesn’t have a retired lady behind the counter with a cup of tea, whilst a dyed-​blonde, 40-​something manager has a quiet fag out the back, I feel uneasy.
If, like me, you yearn for spring mornings spent looking up and down racks of late-​90s CD singles or wet Wednesday afternoons checking out the spines of 30p paperbacks; always seeking that elusive thing you’ve been after for ages, or stumbling upon something new you’ve never heard of (well, it’s worth a go for 45p) then I could recommend many, many great charity shops in Birmingham.
Sutton Coldfield’s Settlement Shop gets the nod over the others, because it’s one shop I’ve frequented for years and always fulfils my hitherto unanalysed expectations of what a great British charity shop is about.
The volunteers are never less than friendly, the books are always in order (the unspoken mark of a charity shop that cares) and the records are — by and large — cheap. There’s genuine warmth to the place, which makes one glad that such places and people still exist. In a time when a lot of charity shops have gone inflationary and what one might have cost 20p is now labelled at a tenner; Sutton’s Settlement Shop, and all the others I’ve visited (including Wylde Green, Boldmere and Erdington) keep ploughing their humble, homely furrow.
1989 novelty tie? £15 stereo with twin-​cassette deck? Obscure board game? Brown and cream food blender with yellowing instruction manual? Fishing DVDs? What more could the eclectic drifter and borderline hoarder want?
It goes without saying (though I’m saying it anyway) that despite the customer angle of this review, charity shops exist to raise money for worthwhile causes. The Settlement Shop for instance is a Birmingham-​based charity helping the poor, old and young in our city. I don’t wanna get guilt-​trippy on ya ‘cos that’s not why I go round these places but I dunno why prats like Mary Portas moan about the amount of charity shops ‘cos they’re doing good work for someone somewhere. That the Sutton Settlement Shop do it by providing me with endless amounts of books (in this very shop I stumbled on an expensive student edition of King Lear, which came in no end of help when studying at nightschool, for 90p (RRP: £17.50)) and gives us all a place to search for hidden treasure away from the faceless consumerism of today’s retail parks is all the better.