Prince Charming
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The Charity Shop is traditionally the poor relation in the shopping parade. It mushrooms like mould in our high streets; a woolly growth between estate agents and building societies redolent of must and mothballs that embarrasses its window-dressed nearest and dearest. It is the store that re-cycles our discarded youth and the remnants of our late kith and kin and every High Street has a jumble of them. And that includes Tetbury, Gloucestershire.
Only its newest charity shop is the talk of the town, the cream of the crop, or to use the most apposite cliché, the jewel in the crown.
It belongs to Prince Charles and it opened last month.
Some people – mainly boys – dream of being astronauts. Others aspire to be footballers like David Beckham. The Prince of Wales on the other hand has always wanted to be a grocer (although it has to be said not the sort of chap who serves behind the counter with a pencil behind his ear and a ready way with the ham-slicer).
He wanted an outlet to sell the organic produce that is grown at his Cotswold home of Highgrove. He hankered after a store to display his Duchy Original biscuits, jams, condiments and favourite malt whisky. He needed somewhere where he could shift a few of his favourite things including fancy flora for the grand gardener.
And last month he went a long way in achieving that ambition when he opened his shop Highgrove in the centre of Tetbury, only a couple of miles from his home. However it is neither Harrods (heaven forbid) nor is it a branch of Londis, Spar or Costcutter. It is true that it sells matches, soap, preserves, bunches of flowers and a large variety of root vegetables, but it is not the sort of retail outlet that you would pop into when you run out of milk and fags. And anyway it closes at 5.30pm, isn’t run by an Indian and gives all its profits to good causes.
For it is less costermonger more charity shop for the chattering classes.
It cost £2 million to redevelop into a spotless upper middle class temple to rustic chic. The pastel blue doors of the limestone frontage open onto a large room littered with distressed artisan tools (galvanised watering cans, sickles, double-handed saws and such like) that are the standard kit of the well-bred Cotswold interior decorator. On the back wall there is a trompe l’oeil of a wooded clearing. Another wall boasts a finely carved fire-surround that doesn’t contain a fire. And it sells a number of books advising the Range Rover-driving customers snapping up Duchy Original bottled water on how to save the planet.
It is a shop for the gentry and it is jammed with the well-heeled trying to be worthy.
On the Thursday afternoon I dropped by, for example, every single fresh organic vegetable had, with the exception of a single beetroot, been sold. The Highgrove own-label fudge, which I bet came from The Toffee Shop in Penrith, was running out of the shop faster than a Republican from a coronation, while Highgrove’s own-label champagne was nestling comfortably in the majority of the store’s in-house ethnic brown cloth shopping bags.
The town loves this shop. The Chairman of Tetbury Chamber of Commerce Jeremy Townsend said it is ‘a fantastic bonus for Tetbury’. Town councillor Tony Walsh said ‘it is one of the best things that have happened to this town in 20 years’. And even Cary Thompson, who runs a not-so-organic fruit and veg stall in the 500-year-old market hall 50 yards away, says ‘it’s a boost for the whole town’. Actually it is a fillip for the whole area.
In recent years the Cotswolds has been as damned as Disneyland: ‘Sloane Square with grass’ was how game show host Anne Robinson described it last year. She recently moved back to London after complaining that there were ‘more stars than fetes for them to open’.
Cotswold ‘Aga-saga’ author Joanna Trollope has also moved away after complaining that there were no shepherds left in the pubs, while the writer A.A. Gill described modern life in the Cotswolds as ‘a desire to live rural-lite – that is to have lots of horses but not much manure’.
And what is wrong with that? Why should we live like caricature country folk wearing cast-offs from a rubbish thrift shop?
Let’s celebrate our urbane charity shop that now serves our area with the finest trugs, the freshest vegetables and the most superior baling twine (at only £16.65). It is the Cotswolds’ very own Disney Store and one, I might add, that makes the majority of the shops in the metropolis – charity or otherwise – look like unsophisticated village stalls