Enter an Aladdin’s cave of the quirky, collectable and bizarre
LYNETTE PINCHESS takes a look around Nottingham city centre’s most intriguing shop
IT’S full of clothes, jewellery, records, toys and things you never really knew you needed - like a ram’s skull, larger-than-life Oscars from an actual ceremony or a fish and chip shop Pukka Pies sign.
You never know what you’ll find at Nottingham’s quirkiest and most intriguing shop.
With four floors of fascinating finds - plus a coffee shop and bar, barber and tattoo parlour - it’s easy to while away the hours browsing all the weird and wonderful objects for sale.
Hopkinson Vintage, Antiques and Art Centre, in Station Street, isn’t one of those stuffy, old-fashioned shops even though the Victorian building, a former hardware shop, dates back to the 1800s.
There’s a very cool, rocky vibe... perhaps it’s because they’re playing Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water as I walked through the door.
The ground floor is a feast for the eyes, while something exciting is happening in the basement – as the Haunted Museum has just moved in.
Anyone on the hunt for vintage, unusual, nostalgic or macabre possessions will be in their element.
It’s hard to know where to begin. Vintage teacups and saucers, old records (Bruce Willis or Abba - take your pick), clocks, lamps, necklaces and all the artefacts you’d expect to see fill the cabinets and shelves.
But there’s so much more besides. A collectors’ paradise, hobbyists will find a box of vintage beer mats, perfume bottles, empty and part-used, and horror magazines.
Children of the 60s, 70s and 80s, are in for a proper nostalgia fest with toys and the kind of crockery your granny would serve tea on.
You might end up kicking yourself. I spotted an old Mackintosh’s Quality Street tin, rare apparently, with a £25 price tag.
As a child I had exactly the same one with a parrot on the lid which no doubt ended up in the dustbin. I can’t see a plastic Celebrations’ container having the same appeal 30 years on - but who knows?
Hopkinson’s originally opened with racks of vintage clothing from the 1940s to 70s. The market’s changing with an increasing number of brands, such as Adidas and Nike, from the 90s and 2000s now proving popular.
Some of the wares celebrate Nottinghamshire’s rich heritage including a Gedling Colliery sign and a suitcase full of old copies of Nottingham Evening Post reports on major royal events. Most of the items sell for a few pounds but occasionally there’s a treasure in their midst that might fetch a few thousand, like a 1950s jukebox, a few years ago.
You have to wonder who would buy a noticeboard proclaiming: “Amazing wonder jelly Vaseline, roll up, roll up, 50 uses, be astounded.” One of the most eye-catching items, overseeing the shop from atop a cabinet, is Ghostbusters’ Slimer but he’s not for sale, said Hopkinson’s owner Liam Woodgates.
Part of a limited edition, the green ectoplasm ghost was cast from the original movie model.
Liam, a former vintage and antique jewellery trader, who travelled up and down the country, launched Hopkinson’s as it is today nearly ten years ago - previously it was an arts hub with galleries and workshops.
“Other cities’ antique centres tended to be quite old fashioned and not very exciting,” he says, explaining why he went down a more quirky route with Hopkinson’s.
“It’s like a mixture of independent department stores and vintage and antiques centres - a one-stop shop so you’ve got your bar and cafe, a tattoo parlour, barbers, guitar department and antiques and vintage sellers across four floors.
“It’s about creating affordable retail space for independent businesses and the idea is people can test products and businesses and grow them without as much risk and hopefully they’ll feed onto bigger things. We’re had quite a few success stories.”
As well as renting space out to sellmemorable
I’ve just acquired 3,000 vintage X-rays so they are quite interesting. There’s broken bones and a lot of hip replacements. Liam Woodgates
ers, Liam has his own personal collection of oddities, the macabre, medical instruments and scientific equipment.
He says: “I’ve just acquired 3,000 vintage X-rays so they are quite interesting. There’s broken bones and a lot of hip replacements.
“One of the strangest items I named the ‘squirrodile’ because it was a taxidermy squirrel with a crocodile claw.
“We have marble urns off graves, legally acquired when they replenished the graveyards. They are nice decorative interior pieces and there’s a double Grifter bicycle that probably would have been used in circus.”
We can understand shoppers snapping up jewellery and kitsch kitchenware but who buys these curiosities?
Liam says: “Creative people. Interior designers buy a lot of our stuff. We sell a lot to the castle, theatre props for plays, and bars. We kit out a lot of the Curious Venues’ bars and restaurants.
“We’ve helped to kit out a lot of the bars and restaurants in Nottingham, the Malt Cross and Boilermaker - we did all the furniture for that originally.
“We do house clearances - imagine a whole house worth of stuff coming in. You never know what’s going to come in next,” he adds.
Hopkinson’s will be celebrating its tenth birthday soon, with a familyfriendly street market from Friday August 20 to Sunday August 22.