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Oxfam Magdalen Street

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Oxfam Magdalen Street

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Our store on Magdalen Street is one of the biggest Oxfam shops in the country. Come treasure hunting! Oxfam Magdalen St is one of the biggest in the country.

We sell fashion, homewares, collectables, ethical gifts, Fair Trade tea & coffee, toys, linen -- and everything else! We are full of treasures -- come treasure-hunting!

07/10/2026

A round of applause for Keith, Jane, Rupert, Gav, Simon, Naomi, and every other volunteer who braved the shop today.

They turned up to find a diva of a manager demanding we change everything on the shop floor and go "full Christmas". Then, halfway through, he changed his stupid flaky mind and insisted we start the whole process again.

These nice photos are nothing but a cover-up. At 10am this morning the shop floor was an absolute wreck, full of trip hazards, traps and stress-inducing mess. But you all fixed it, twice, and made it look like it was all part of the plan.

A special mention goes to Richard, who performed a minor engineering miracle and built our new Unwrapped display unit.

Every eye roll, every swear (honestly, you lot could make a sailor blush) and every exasperated "what on earth is he doing now?!" is forgiven. 💚

P.S. If you're a Thursday volunteer reading this, brace yourself. There's more to come.

15/09/2026

Please behold today’s transformation of our homewares department, all beautifully arranged and coordinated by our brilliantly observant and creative volunteer Thistle.
We’re not sure it’s ever looked this good! Thank you so much Thistle, you’ve brought out the best in every object 💚

26/08/2026

It's happening.

Brand new Christmas trees, £34.99, out tomorrow.

We're sorry.

23/08/2026

Just because the best tailoring you've ever seen is above your appendix doesn't mean you have to feed the fast fashion machine!

You'll have to excuse our slightly mangled take on one of the many great lines from Withnail and I there.

It's all Oxfam's fault. We opened a box of Second Hand September promotional materials to find an image of iconic British thesp Richard E Grant, impeccably styled with that loveable twinkle in his eye, and we simply couldn't resist.

Hopefully you all know the SHS drill by now. Only buy second-hand clothing for a month - no big high-street retailers and no grotty fast-fashion websites.

Here's the part we don't say often enough. Clothing is the thing we receive more of than anything else, by a distance. It arrives at the back door every day and IT DOES NOT STOP. Winter coats in July. Summer dresses in January. We pile it into great white woven sacks rather than plastic ones, having decided it was daft to lecture anyone about waste while getting through bin liners in those quantities. They stack up in the back like sandbags, and by the time our volunteers have filled the last rail, another wall of textiles is waiting.

Our point is, enough clothing already exists in the world, and most of it seems to find its way here. So nobody needs another polybag mailer landing on the doormat tomorrow when this shop alone has enough on the rails to dress half of Norwich.

The man on the poster would approve.

Chin chin. 🍷💚

18/08/2026

If you’ve been in the shop today, you’ve probably marvelled with astonishment at how clean it is!

All credit for this is due to the magnificent people pictured here: the members of GoodGym.norwich

GoodGym are a brilliant organisation who keep fit by doing useful things to help others; this week, 18 of them ran, walked or cycled to Oxfam Magdalen Street.
With incredible gusto and in just an hour, they transformed the place! Tables were tidied, floors were mopped and vacuumed, shelves were dusted and even the gents’ toilet floor, which was still bearing signs of a recent plumbing disaster, was rendered spotless. Although it looked worse than it was and there was no risk of typhoid, we still felt bad suggesting they clean it - but everyone was so lovely and willing that we needn’t have worried 💚

On their previous visit here, Good Gym eradicated the vestiges of an epic child+black paint+tricycle catastrophe; this time, they had a scenario where a customer appeared to have pushed a tractor tyre through an oil slick and then rolled it several times around the till. How they got the marks out of the floor we don’t know, but they did! (And yes, that’s the level of mess we’re dealing with here.)

So we owe a massive thank you to Ian, Sarah, Elizabeth, Stephen, Beth, Mark, Jennifer, Andy, Jonathan, Mildred, Jack, Frankie, Liz, Jordan, Emma, Maddy, Ben and Andy. Thank you so much everyone - this was a very big ask but you’ve done amazingly! We are so impressed and hugely grateful 💚

15/08/2026

This week, we’d like to thank the Department of Extra-Terrestrial Immigration for donating 600 brand new, unused pens which arrived still sealed in their original packaging. (Yes, really!)

While this raises more questions than it answers*, it does mean that henceforth, we might actually be able to find a working pen when we need one. Let’s see how long it takes 600 pens to escape from the pen boxes and be replaced by things that aren’t pens.
Only pens in the pen boxes, people! We’d like to put an end to the challenges of taking down a phone message using a Philips screwdriver or carving a gift aid number into a cardboard box with a crochet hook. We want to believe!

*Our immediate questions were:

Department of what?
Is it real? (The Internet says not)
Are my taxes paying for this?
Did someone order the pens before realising extra-terrestrials can’t write human script to fill in the forms?
Who donated them?
Who bought them in the first place?
Why?

The truth is out there! And now we’ve got something to write it down with 💚

13/08/2026

Yesterday’s eclipse projected through colanders.

Household items for every occasion are available at Oxfam Magdalen Street!

11/08/2026

!Available now!

Dungeon Crawler Carl, books one to three.

Matt Dinniman's sci-fi comedy phenomenon, best described as Hitchhiker's Guide meets Dungeons and Dragons. If you don't know it, the pitch sounds ridiculous. Aliens demolish every building on Earth and turn what's left into an eighteen-level dungeon, then broadcast the survivors as entertainment for the galaxy.

Carl steps outside to retrieve his ex-girlfriend's cat and consequently faces the apocalypse in his boxer shorts. The cat, a champion show Persian called Princess Doughnut, gains the power of speech and an ego to match. Later, they adopt a dinosaur.

It should be utter codswallop. But it's become one of the most popular series going, and the people who love it DO NOT shut up about it!

So come and find out what all the fuss is about. 💚

19/07/2026

Norwich Slide Archive, Part 2!

Following on from our post featuring the 1982 Lord Mayor's Procession, some happy news. That mystery box of unlabelled 35mm slides, dozens of tiny windows onto a lost Norwich, has found a home.

Friend of the shop Nick Stone has bought the lot on behalf of Norfolk Heritage Centre, which means this remarkable archive is going exactly where it ought to. Into the county archive, where it'll be cleaned up, catalogued and preserved.

Before all that, however, we thought we'd indulge ourselves one last time. So here are twenty of our favourites for your viewing pleasure.

You probably recognise them instantly, even while your brain insists something is wrong. Every frame is Norwich, and every frame is somehow not quite the Norwich we all know. Strangely familiar, as a wiser person than us once put it.

One shot even does the archivists' work for them. The White Lion Street pic shows a Harold Wilson 'Say Yes to Europe' billboard, pinning it to the spring of 1975, just before the referendum.

And there are one or two glimpses of our beloved Magdalen Street as well. Forty-odd years of Norwich-based photography, though, and we were somehow missed. Not one single frame. over on Bridewell Alley, however, gets a look in. We'll probably get over it.

One final thing. We still have absolutely no idea who
donated this extraordinary collection, and the wonderful team at Norfolk Heritage Centre would love the opportunity to speak to whoever did. So if these boxes once lived in your loft, or belonged to a relative, or if you recognise it and know where it came from, we'd be delighted to hear from you. 💚

13/07/2026

We recently received a large donation of 35mm slides, comprising around 300 images taken across Norwich, some dating back to as far as 1974. It's a whole treasure trove of local history, all in glorious Fujichrome.

We were holding them up to the light one by one, but then someone conveniently donated a lightbox, so it's all worked out rather nicely.

We'll be sharing more over the coming days, but to get the ball rolling, here are a few slides from the 1982 Lord Mayor's Procession. It took a lot of squinting, and an Anchor Butter wagon helpfully celebrating its own centenary, to pin down the year.

And what a day it was.

A tropical island sailing down the road on an inflatable boat. King Neptune ruling the waves from a kitchen chair. A Great Yarmouth entry still apparently haunted by the great ladybird plague of '76, its banner shrieking SWARMS OF LADYBIRDS INVADE YARMOUTH BEACH, while a man in white shorts fought them off with a giant spray can labelled LADYKILLER.

The Midland Bank celebrated the suffragettes outside a cardboard Number 10, complete with a fancy-dress Margaret Thatcher waving from the doorway. There was a Wild West saloon, a steel band, the Speedway Supporters Club with real bikes, and one heroic group who looked at everyone else riding comfortably on lorries and decided instead to shuffle the entire route in chains, dressed as a Victorian prison gang, on one of the hottest days of the year.

And behind every single frame sat St Stephens Street car park, packed to the rafters. Every level, every railing, whole families wedged in for a better view. An entire city turned out to watch its neighbours trundle past dressed as insects, sea gods and convicts.

It's been forty-four years and we'd wager more than a few faces in these frames still live within a mile of this shop.

Were you there? Were you a hula girl, a ladybird, Neptune himself? Do you recognise anyone? We'd love to hear from you if you do.

Norfolk County Archives

Address

8-10 Magdalen Street
Norwich
NR31HU

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 5pm
Tuesday	9am - 5pm
Wednesday	9am - 5pm
Thursday	9am - 5pm
Friday	9am - 5pm
Saturday	9am - 5pm
Sunday	11am - 3pm

Telephone

+441603665508

Website

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/shop/local-shops/oxfam-shop-magdalen-street

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