Adam Scovell

‘The place through which he made his way at leisure was one of those receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in odd corners of this town and to hide their musty treasures from the public eye in jealousy and distrust.’ In Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, Nell Trent’s grandfather loses his precious shop to the malicious money-lender Quilp. London’s junk shops have, it seems, always been under some form of threat. But the forces against them today appear unstoppable. The junk shop is increasingly the sole preserve of the city’s ‘odd corners’ – pushed out by hiked rents, the charity-shop boom with its variety of cost dispensations, and the popularity of eBay and Vinted.

A campaign is under way to rename the West End’s Duchess Theatre after the playwright Terence Rattigan. Supported as it is by the likes of Judi Dench and Rattigan Society president David Suchet, there’s evidently a desire to right a historical wrong. Author of classics such as The Browning Version, The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables, Rattigan was known for his poise, melancholy and restraint, all of which put him at odds with the coterie of upstart writers of the 1950s – still amusingly known as the Angry Young Men. It’s an oft-repeated chapter of theatre history that arch-kitchen-sinkers such as John Osborne made the environment virtually impossible for Rattigan to work in. Rattigan joked about it at the 1956 opening of Look Back in Anger.