Oxfam

This is a really nice chairty shop, run by very friendly and helpful staff. They sell a good selection of fair trade gifts– including chocolates, ornaments, and jewellery.
They stock a good range of quality second hand goods, with a wide range of books and household goods. They also sell a lot of used stamps, cds, and greetings cards.
At Christmas time they sell a wide range of gifts, including special gift certificates such as goats, tree planting, trees, and school books, for families in poor countries.
You can usually find soemthing here for everyone on your gift list, and of course you have the added benefit of knowing you are helping such a worthwhile charity.
The staff are friendly and helpful and make visits to this shop a pleasure.

This is the first ever Oxfam shop. It is a little bit of history. It is probably the first ever charity shop.
Oxfam is an Oxford institution. The name comes from the telegraph address of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief which was set up in 1942 to try and get food through the Allied blockade of Europe to the people who were starving in Greece and elsewhere. The headquarters of the British organisation are still in Oxford.
Oxfam shops are a British institution. Since 1948 people having been giving their unwanted clothes, books and nick-​nacks to Oxfam and other people having been going there to find bargains.
The front of this store is full of new goods: fair trade food and jewelery, cards and gifts, books on fair trade, cookery, development and the environment, books for children, CDs of world music and neat bags made from old saris that fold up into their own little pocket so that you can easily carry them around and never accept another plastic bag. Upstairs and downstairs you can still buy second-​hand clothes but you are not that likely to find anything really cheap — Oxfam knows it has a shop in a prime real position and the clothes here will be of a higher quality and a higher price than you would find in their Cowley Road branch.