If there's one thing Josie Long bloody loves, it's charity shop shopping. That and comedy, of course. She often marries the two in her (multi award-winning) comedy, perhaps bringing to a gig a trinket from Kennington Association For Lop-Sided Daschunds for a bit of show and tell.

So, in these skinty times, Josie and London is Funny have teamed up to create London is Thrifty – where Josie will review every ruddy charity shop in London!

It's like a Michael Palin show without the colonial undertones! It's gonna blow your face off! It's gonna take bloomin' ages! Over to you, Josie...

My name is Josie Long and I love charity shops. How else could you see into that many old ladies’ living rooms? It wouldn’t be allowed unless you pretended to be from the council. And even then they are getting too savvy, what with the internet and everything. Shopping in a good charity shop is not really shopping. It’s hunting, for mysterious, haunted treasures.

I grew up in Orpington in the suburbs of London. It’s not nice enough to be in proper Kent, or exciting enough to be in proper London, it’s just sitting in the middle, waiting. It’s a boring place without much going on in the way of culture, but it has charity shops like nowhere else I have ever seen. There weren’t old or beautiful buildings, but these places let you find things that were rare and strange and old.

Chislehurst and Petts Wood nearby are full of elderly maiden aunts who have hoarded their 1950s tea dresses and costume jewellery, only to have it taken away by middle-aged relatives and put into shops that look just like the houses they came from. The shops themselves have a quaintness to them that you don’t see anywhere else.Hospice care in Petts Wood has themed displays every week like “Tennis!” or “Scotland!” like I imagine department stores did in 1963.

Me and my friends hated Orpington. We hated that everyone voted Tory and how safe and second rate we thought it was. We hated the fact that everyone went to Mark One and New Look and bought the same clothes. We thought we were angry little punks; we were probably annoying, and definitely precocious, but charity shops for us were places where we could have our own identity. We could wear dead men’s pyjamas and ugly wool skirts. Charity shops let me find out who X-Ray Spex were for 25p.

I didn’t have any money, but slip dresses were never more than £1.50. By the time I left for university I had 30 pieces of 1970s naff underwear that would make my mum beg my friend Lydia to get me to “put on outer clothes when I went outside”. The Salvation Army on Orpington High Street got to know me. They would put aside slips, which I still have out of curiosity. When was bright orange ever an appropriate night-time colour?

GO ON GIRL, GET IN THERE!

“Vintage” clothes are problematic for me. Seemingly everyone before 1985 was so consumptive and undernourished that their minute little tea dresses might as well be hankies to me, hankies with “fat modern cow” embroidered on a corner. Charity shopping is not vintage shopping. It’s not about being fashionable or hip. Fuck that. It’s about the random element and the excitement of a good find. The unusual and the full of stories.

The best recent find I know about was a present my friend Emma gave me. It’s a hand-knitted scarf made from about 30 panels, each in a different style with a different Scandinavian girl’s name embroidered into it. Maybe it was a school project. But what kind of cruel teacher gets rid of that? I like to think of it as a sinister trophy list. But this is just one little example. There is so much more out there to find.

The brief

This is what makes a good charity shop:
1. No nearby hipsters stealing all the good stuff to put on eBay or show off with.
2. No needless knowledge of the value of the goods. “We had a camera expert in to value that”. (I appreciate that it’s uncharitable for me to be upset by this, but it’s not the charity shop way.)
3. Not in a big town centre – these tend to be too upmarket, and full of Primark (which is now rife, and so frustrating!) The further out, the stranger the things. The worse state a place is in, the more chance of real finds (which again looks grim written down, and is a bit morally dubious.)

This is what I’m going to do:
In Orpington the shops were superb. I was spoilt. But moving around London from Acton (which is a punishment in itself) then Peckham, and now Hackney, I feel like I don’t know enough about what’s good and where to go in central London. So what I’m going to do is try and find, then rate, every charity shop in London, borough by borough, starting with Hackney, to eventually build up a totally comprehensive guide.

Every couple of weeks I will be bringing you reviews from around the capital – but I need your help! Send hints and tips. Where are your favourites and why? Please let me know what’s opening/closing down too, as, by my calculations, this should take me 35 years. The email is londonisthrifty@gmail.com. Finally, once a few tech gremlins have been terminated, you will be able to go straight to this section from www.londonisthrifty.com.