Old clothes and unintended consequences

I like charity shops for buying clothes. There is a sense of adventure, almost a feeling of being on a treasure hunt, as you look through the chaotic muddle of mixed cast-offs to see if you can find any hidden gems. It is so different from real shops where there are rows of identical styles and colours in all sizes. Instead there is an eclectic mix of sizes and styles and only one of each item. The element of a random gamble makes shopping so much more interesting! 

But there are problems behind this world of recycling clothes. There are many new clothes available for next to nothing that are sourced from the sweat shops in low income economies. They are so cheap when new that they are hardly worth selling second hand. They do not retain their pristine shape for long so they are soon handed in to charity shops. There are thus many tonnes of clothes donated:  far too many to be sold on the limited rails of any small town charity shop. So the shop hangs out on display what it thinks it can sell, sends to the head office anything of particular value or interest (many charities have premium shops that only sell designer brands) and then sells on all that is left over by weight.

When there were fewer charity shops and clothes were more expensive and they would try and sell most of the stuff that was donated in their stores and the remainder was sold for next to nothing for rags for recycling.

Now however a new trade has grown up to sort and sell these large amounts of second hand clothing to different markets. This came to light in recent news stories. There was serious concern expressed when it was revealed that the company who bought all the spare old clothes from Salvation Army recycling centres had made £1million profit by selling them on to shops in central and eastern Europe. It seems that there are many shops in these countries that want well known western brands such as Marks and Spencer or Next. No one suggested that anyone had done anything wrong. There was just incredulity that the surplus donated clothes had generated such profits. The Salvation Army was said to be looking at the policy of selling on their excess of donated items.

There is another consequence but this time in Africa. There are so many second hand clothes being shipped into certain African countries and being sold for low prices that local people who make a living from sewing and making garments are going out of business. No wonder when we see pictures on the TV news from an African village many people are wearing western tee shirts with recognisable slogans. This is particularly ironic when you see that Oxfam and other charities are selling fair trade clothes sourced from similar third world countries. Perhaps a solution can only come if there is widespread public revulsion at the cheap sweat shop produced clothes that leads to policies of ethical corporate responsibility that some chain stores have adopted. This will mean the end of the very cheap clothes that not only have destroyed much of the British made clothing industry but is now doing the same to producers in Africa!

Charity shops can be fun and raise much needed money for good causes but with the interconnectedness of the world economy, the booming trade in second hand clothes can sometimes have unintended consequences.

A former town planner reflects...

Walking through the depressing shopping mall that is the town centre of Cumbernauld new town I found an enormous range of pound shops. I didn't know there were so many chains specialising in this niche market. There was only one bookshop and that was of the discount "stack 'em high" variety. I nearly lost the will to live. A town centre tells you much about the aspirations and current state of a town. This mall told me if you want to buy any quality item go elsewhere. Cumbernauld New Town, once voted The Worlds Best New Town by the Association of American Architects, is now consistently voted the worst town in Scotland.

And this is the result of town planning. The new town rose in its concrete splendour in the hilly North Lanarkshire countryside from the dream of an architect/planners drawing board in the years immediately following 1956. Fifty five years later we can survey the results and judge the long term effects of this social engineering project.

The segregation of traffic from pedestrians has worked. This is a place where it is frequently quicker to walk to the centre from where you live than take the car, even though there seem to be ample car parks. The landscaping has worked - indeed there are so many trees along the roadsides between the various different parts of the town that you can think you have left the town completely. Early pictures from the sixties reveal a much bleaker appearance before the landscaping matured. And some of the architecture has worked.


But some of the architecture hasn't. The shopping centre is a case in point. In December 2005 the entire Town Centre won a public nomination for demolition in the Channel 4 series Demolition, where it was voted "the worst building in Britain".  The website of the Cumbernauld shopping centre bravely states that the scheme was “crowned as the UK’s first indoor shopping complex... the centre can claim to be the blueprint for all premier indoor shopping centres around the country today.” The outside may look bleak but inside the pound shops, charity shops and empty units line long malls connected by confusing passages and corridors, all decorated with shiny tiles. I couldn't get out of my mind that I was in a confusing labyrinthine public convenience!

The residential areas of Cumbernauld were designed with no pedestrian crossings, (zebra or pelican crossings, or traffic lights) Pedestrians had to cross roads by bridges and tunnels. This could not last and there is now a set of traffic lights in the Condorrat neighbourhood and traffic/pelican lights were erected beside the new Tesco in 2004.

One claim to fame is that Cumbernauld was the location for the film Gregory's Girl,  the well known and popular 1981 rom-com about coming of age and teenage unrequited love. I must revisit that film thirty years on and see if the locations are still recognisable.

Most of the residential areas are pleasant and the housing stock is of a high quality and at a much lower price than nearby Stirling or Falkirk. Externally some of  the housing schemes with their penchant for concrete and flat roofs and the tendency to have rows of garages facing the road with the houses facing onto a pedestrian walkway can give a bleak and depressing central European communist era feel.

So does it work as a space to live and work? It has many very pleasant residential areas and, like all towns, some areas with more needs and social problems. It was built too close to established centres of employment, commerce and shopping for the town to need to be self contained. Thus it works as a Glasgow commuter suburb, now with the greatly expanded car park at nearby Croy station. (Cumbernauld station itself is on a branch line with an infrequent service to anywhere.) The lively, modern shopping centres of Stirling and Falkirk are each only twenty minutes away. It is a pleasant place to live and much more attractive than in the early days when it looked like a modernist experiment in a vast greenfield building site. (Which I suppose it was.) The award winning architecture of the centre looks tired and dated and is widely disliked.

But the people of Cumbernauld were Glasgow people, moved there in the fifties and sixties from poor tenements and substandard housing. They have triumphed through the strength of the human spirit to make the place a lively and loved community that happily ignores the social engineering that went on all around them.

Emerging church?

Statistics suggest that the church in Britain is facing meltdown. There are many responses but I categorise them basically as twofold. First, a new emerging church is forming tentatively and albeit on a very small scale. This is a localised, uncoordinated, grass roots movement, ignoring the traditional ecclesiasial structures where people are seeking to find ways to live based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. This contrasts with the more common institutional response to decline by those who cannot see beyond their inherited views and live within the known structures. These are people who seem to be facing backwards to steer forwards, envisioning a future based on the remembered experiences of the past.

Emerging church is small and locally based, aiming to fit in with peoples lifestyles and without a clergy class to control it. Most of the groups are based on three principles - : a concern to embrace those looking for God; a corporate desire to know and worship God; a commitment to live together that goes beyond superficial friendship. Membership of the groups is open and the boundaries are fuzzy - there are no controls or standards of belief for those joining. It is a community where participation is more important than doctrine and peer to peer help and support is normative. The church always has been tempted to believe it is an end in itself. The characteristics that Jesus showed are less attractive – love, vulnerability, redemptive suffering, service and these living communities try to live out these values in their corporate life. They are participatory, interactive, learning communities with the characteristics of honesty and reality in acknowledging ambiguity and brokenness in the world as they find it. They have minimal structure look for meaning and the voice of God in contemporary culture. There is little or no emphasis on buildings with sacred spaces created on an ad-hoc basis.

But being small, uncoordinated and informal is also a weakness. Should a new form of structural church emerge that gains widespread popular support, and there are large wealthy Christian organisations who using the latest technology and business models to achieve such ascendancy, then these “fresh expressions” of “emerging church” could be crushed and forgotten. They will go down in history as a temporary aberration, just as the hippy Jesus movement of the sixties now is a relic of a past age (though a fond memory for some romantic aging rockers in the church!)

Are those living an alternative lifestyle or counter culturally a source for renewal? They are little known beyond their own circles and they have no influence in the all important formation of opinion by the media. How do these experimental experiences become more widely known? Where else is the discourse and experimentation taking place envisioning futures for church away from the tired icons of the denominations. In which forums are significant debates taking place involving innovative blue sky thinking and who, if anyone, is listening?