It’s a long time since secondhand was second best, particularly where your outfit is concerned, and there are few better places for a vintage shopping haul than Liverpool.
The city’s thriving thrift scene mixes carefully curated charity shops with established vintage chains and iconic independents – some of which have been around for 40-plus years. Liverpool OG vintage shops like 69A, Pop Boutique and Soho’s arrived in the seventies and eighties with punk and new wave, and surfed the city’s counter cultural wave right through to the modern day.
Of course nowadays vintage isn’t just for an ‘alternative’ crowd. Fast fashion has made all of us appreciate clothes that last longer than a season (or in some cases, a wash cycle) with the quality workmanship and materials of yesteryear becoming more sought after.
So if you’re after some new old clothes and want to know where to start, check out this list of our favourite Liverpool vintage shops. They’re all within walking distance of each other, though you’ll have more stamina than us if you can get round them all in one trip.
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Liverpool City Centre69A
More detailsVintage and antiques shop 69A looks like it fell out of the pages of a storybook. A black cat is asleep in the window, its head resting on a pile of secondhand books. A sign on the door warns you to ‘please take care’ and says nothing about who or what of. Once inside, the narrow room stretches further and further back until you lose sight of where you came in.
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RopewalksCow Liverpool
More detailsIf the haphazard chaos of charity shops puts you off buying pre-loved clothes, Cow Liverpool is your place to start. Spaciously laid out with well curated rails, it feels more like a vintage boutique than a secondhand free-for-all.
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RopewalksOxfam Bold Street
More detailsThis well spaced, well-organised charity shop has a gorgeous collection of curated secondhand clothes including plenty of nineties and Y2K vintage (yes that’s classed as vintage nowadays, and yes you are getting old).
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RopewalksPop Boutique Liverpool
More detailsRichard Free, the man behind the Pop Boutique mini empire, began collecting vintage clothing in the 1970s and has built up a very enviable list of sources and suppliers over the last 50 years.
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Baltic TriangleRed Brick Market
More detailsIf you love thrifting, vintage clothes, handmade jewellery, secondhand vinyl, charming curios, retro homeware, old comics, and the like, you will love Red Brick Market. It’s a huge warehouse carved up into 200+ intriguing little shops, all independently owned, and selling all manner of beguiling and beautiful items.
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RopewalksResurrection
More detailsThis double-level vintage and music merch store started life in Quiggins Arcade before moving to Bold Street (now the unofficial centre of vintage shopping in Liverpool).
Downstairs they’ve got more band T-shirts than the crowd at Glastonbury, spanning from Tupac to Talking Heads. They’re not secondhand but they’re still cheap at £30 for two. Upstairs is where you get your thrift store finds.
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RopewalksSoho’s Liverpool
More detailsSoho’s is one of the original vintage clothing stores in Liverpool, and one of the biggest. With a hairdressers, a tattoo artist, and a piercing studio all stacked within the same building, it’s a bonafide emporium of alternative, retro style.
