London Unchained!
Don’t you just love it when you go down a little alleyway and right at the end of it, you find a lovely little shop you dind’t know about, with the kind of owner who knows absolutely everything about what they’re selling, and you manage to find that little widget you’ve been looking for for the last ten years, and at half what you thought you were going to have to pay?
Now of course that’s the kind of thing you used to have to put down to good luck, or sometimes you’d hear about from a friend who’d shopped there. But now there’s a website that aims to put these excellent independent shops on the map – the London Unchained guide.
I checked it out today. It’s quite new, so I wasn’t expecting it to have everything, but I was pleasantly surprised to find some of my favourites already there. Gosh Comics, the amazing John Sandoe bookshop in Chelsea, Paxton & Whitfield cheese shop, and Scooter Emporium in Shoreditch.
A couple of new ones I must try out though. Coco de Mer, an erotic emporium, sounds a cut above Anne Summers, and then there’s Duke of Uke in Hanbury Street, Bethnal Green – the heart of Jack the Ripper territory – selling ukeleles and banjos.
The site is well designed, with a search engine that lets you search by shop name, type of goods, or character (buzzy, classic, trendy, quaint…) And it doesn’t just cover central London – Hackney, Notting Hill, Hampstead are all in there too. Altogether a lovely site if you want to escape the world domination attempt of the chain stores, or just feel like discovering a couple of quirky shops to spend some time in.
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