My new book: Charity Shop World
An investigation into community, consumption and waste
I’m thrilled to announce that my brand new book Charity Shop World – an investigation into community, consumption and waste is now available for pre-order.
You can pre-order right here:
Four years in the making
This is a book I’ve been working on for the past four years, including sixteen months of sorting through donations at a London charity shop to explore all the weird, wonderful and disturbing things people drop off in carrier bags.
Charity Shop World is an investigation into textile waste – where it ends up and who really profits. Expect to deep dive into some murky bank accounts and explode narratives about who the fashion system actually benefits.
The flip side of this book is the cost of living crisis – the consequences of austerity turning the UK into ‘a poor society with some very rich people in it.’ It is about charity shops as places of human connectivity where local communities struggle to find their way through economic hardship to reach more sustainable ways of living.
Expulsion
As I researched this book, the economic, political and environmental climate got worse, including the abandonment of communities by central government and the capitalization of this malaise by the far right. Writing Charity Shop World led me to the conclusion that to understand ‘stuff’ we must draw parallels between how we treat stuff and how we treat people.
Charity Shop World is a book about the expulsion of stuff from our homes, expulsion out the back of the shop, expulsion overseas – the processes we know little about and choose not to think about. But it is also about the expulsion of people, the transformation from a society that once brought people in, to one that now pushes people out.
In a world where ‘broken’ things and ‘unwanted’ people are expelled to the margins of society, I wanted to write this book as a call for a new way of living to rise up from the debris of overproduction and consumption.
More to say over the coming months but pre-ordering is incredibly important and will really help me out if you are able to:
First Reviews
If you need an additional reason to pre-order, the reviews are starting to come in and they are great:
