Celebrities, cake and second-hand clothes. An odd way to spend a Sunday evening but for that reason all the more enjoyable.
At 6.15pm yesterday I arrived at St Pancras Old Church for my own form of worship: shopping, at Oxfam’s Rumble In The Jumble. I immediately regretted not getting dressed until 5pm (don’t judge, Sunday is Sunday) because the queue was already mahoosive despite the fact the doors had opened at 6pm.
My fellow bargain hunters were a nice bunch though, waiting patiently as we slowly but surely edged towards the tiny but historic grade II listed building with our bags of donated jumble (fact: a church is believed to have existed on this site since AD 314!), and event organisers Dawn Porter and Gemma Cairney popped outside to thank us for waiting and to hand out brownies (I missed out as they started at the back of the queue and reached me just as I made it inside, boohoo!).
Although I had to leave at 7.30pm, leaving me just 20 minutes to shop, I managed to wade through the crowds and pick up a couple of absolute steals from the celebrity stall holders inside. I bought a red COS dress from Gizzi Erskine (who, oddly, was wearing the ASOS dress I wore in Paris!) for just £10 and a genuine Breton top for just £3 from another stall. I later found the Breton top had a couple of holes in the seams on the arm but it’s nothing my tailor at Camden Dry Cleaners can’t fix so it’ll be as good as new when I collect it later this week!
I narrowly missed out on a pair of Vivienne Westwood boots that the gorgeous Grace Woodward was selling for just £25 and I haven’t been able to forget the 2 pristine Whistles blouses I left behind even though they were just £5 each…what was I thinking?!
I can’t be too sad though – I purchase a couple of raffle tickets and just as I was about to leave the winners were announced and guess who won a prize? It’s particularly unbelievable as I won a big bag of hair goodies from Charles Worthington!
Even though I didn’t quite hunt down Dina or Christina, who I’d planned to meet up with at the event, I had fun and I can’t wait to show you my purchases in an upcoming (long overdue) outfit post.
Have you ever been to an event like this? Dawn has already said there’ll be another and I can’t wait!
Rumble In The Jumble was held in collaboration with Oxfam to raise money for International Women’s Day. Over £7000 was raised which will be spent on training 150 midwives! Click here to donate to Oxfam.
