Oxfam St. Giles Celebrates 25 Years- by Rachael Pells
This weekend marked a very special date for the flagship Oxfam bookshop in St. Giles. 25 years ago this week, the shop opened its doors to the public as a space reserved purely for selling books in order to raise money for the charity. This was an immediately popular idea and remains so, especially due to the shop's location amongst the Oxford University colleges. The shop receives a lot of donations and interest from local academics and university associates.
Oxfam and bookshops are naturally linked in a lot of people's minds, but this was only the case after a group of Oxfam supporters had the idea of starting up the specialist store in Oxford. To mark the event, several of the shop's volunteers met on Saturday evening for a ceremonial cake-cutting, for which the Mayor of Oxford very kindly came along to show his support and present some of the longer serving volunteers with certificates. Mr. Armitage expressed his fondness for the shop and also took the opportunity to browse the music section, coming away with some Debussy sheet music.
There are now 141 specialist Oxfam bookshops across the UK, run by over 4,000 volunteers. St. Giles' Oxfam currently has 63 keen volunteers who bring a wide range of specialist skills to the shop, earning Oxfam an estimated £5m over the last quarter of a century. Of course, this incredible achievement would not have been possible without the continued support from the local community and all of the shop's valued customers, for which the bookshop is very keen to thank.
Oxfam Bookshop St. Giles looks forward to many more years of raising money towards fighting poverty, both within the UK and across the third world.
The shop is organising several more events within the community, including a literary evening with Phillip Pullman and Mark Haddon on the 7th of December. This will be held at the St. Giles' Quaker Meeting House, where the local writers will be signing some unique 1st edition books to be sold, as well as opening a discussion on their inspirations behind writing. There are limited tickets available for this special event, but anyone who is interested is invited to contact the shop or pop in to see us.
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