Featured Car Boot Sales: a guide for aliens.

To avoid the language problem, a car boot is an auto's trunk in America.

Sounds pretty odd both ways, if you think about it. But let's not.

The car boot sale seems to be a British thing. Since most forum members are US based, I though a sketch of the much used and abused British institution might be useful. I doubt if you can find many Brits who have not at some time or another been to a boot sale. Usually as buyers or browsers, but hundreds of thousands, probably millions, must have attended as sellers as well.
The concept is simple and the organisation is usually minimal.

The favourite venue is a farmer's field, reasonably flat, and with the livestock removed. Although there can be plenty of livestock 'evidence'.
Sports grounds, school playgrounds, pub car parks, any place big enough to park up the sellers and have parking for the buyers. Sizes can range from 20 or 30 cars in a school car park to a semi permanent site with spaces for hundreds of seller's vehicles and acres of general parking.

Planning (use of land) constraints usually mean sites are limited to maybe half the weekends in a year, not a real problem as no-one much goes out in the winter anyway.
Even in winter some indoor sales are held in warehouses or similar for the die hard booter.

With the most basic, you just turn up, pick a spot and sell. Someone usually comes round sometime and collects the payment, usually about £5. Your more typical do will have a few people on hand to marshal the arriving sellers into neat(ish) rows, and often, collect the modest fee. No facilities are provided for sellers, if you want a table you bring one, and sometimes the organisers arrange simple portable toilets called Portaloos.


Sellers usually get about 15 to 20 feet, room for a car parked side on and a yard or two each end. You park up and set up. Not all that simple. A flash mob or moving crowd follows the latest arrivals, and nervous sellers can be swamped by groping hands, not after their posterior protruberences but anything coming out of the car or van. Usually they will grab and wait to pay, sometimes they grab and scarper.

Old hands like us apply some discipline, newbies may simply flee. We put up a couple of paste tables (decorator's tables for wallpaper hanging, folding and ideal for the job) and then bring stuff out a box at a time, just enough to be able to monitor the buyers. Gradually all the stuff appears and by that time the more frantic pickers will have moved on.

They are no loss, as the folk you want, if you are selling anything but household junk, are the more selective buyers. With these we engage in jovial banter and some mild haggling. Many are regular dealer visitors, and these are a treat, they will select a handful of stuff, pay the modest prices, and look for more. We usually find that in the first hour we take around the equivalent of $300 to $400, then maybe another $150 during the remaining 4 hours we are likely to be there. After the first rush dies down there is usually a steady stream of a real mixture of folk, some who know what they want and many who had no intention of buying a carved ebony crocodile or old Pentax camera when they left home.

Most of the buyers and browsers are nice people, friendly and interesting, and good for a chat if nothing else. Familar faces often have snippets of gossip to exchange as well. Second to stuffing my pockets with handfulls of cash, I enjoy the meet and greet, even if no money changes hands. Although it is remarkable what you can persuade people they can't live without with a bit of blarney.

Some minority of people are in the PITA category. Some don't mean to be but are seriously boring, some try to haggle over really trivial sums, the equivalent of a dollar or less, and some try to snaffle stuff when you are not looking.

It is almost always cash but I will take cheques from people I like the look of. A well trained Brit can tell the social class, probable employment and education of the other random Brit in seconds, so not much risk there. Plus your usual dishonest person has no great desire for the stuff we sell anyway.

Sales usually take place at weekends, either Saturday or Sunday, though other days are used. They usually start at daybreak, and go on till about midday. The wise seller arrives early, as does the wise dealer or private buyer. By 10 AM the idle public throng the ground but do not buy much. By early afternoon the field is empty again, usually with not a lot of litter left, and peace returns till next week.

Good sold vary a lot by location. Many of the larger boot sales near conurbations have a high concentration of market traders in all manner of market trading stuff, from fresh meat to cheap electronic tat. It is amusing to see many of these vanish as word quickly spreads if a few trading standards officails are spotted, looking for the huge amounts of fake stuff and knockoff DVDs that may readily be found.

The type of sale I prefer is in the country more, we favour the Welsh borders, and although there are may pro sellers, there is quite a good proportion of people just out to declutter with a few pounds to take home.

Sometimes the sheer tattiness of people's junk saddens me, why are they offering stuff for pence that was rubbish when it was new? I suppose these must be what are known as 'poor people'.
It is pretty easy for the experienced buyer to cruise the aisles with an eye open for the type of stall or pile worth looking at. Sight of a few older bits of stuff might be a sign that a second look is worthwhile, often a load of houshold junk is a clue that these people have nothing of interest. But you never know.

We are usually too busy selling to buy much. We have had a few minor things, but no great finds. The serious early morning buyers are the ones who get the good stuff.

The car boot sale is the very bottom of the food chain in the antiques world. But it can be a lot more fun than a fancy antiques fair where we paid hundreds for the place to sell, and spend far too much time reading the paper and eating to pass the time.

They have been a feature of the landscape for decades now, and will probably continue for decades more.

That's just a quickish run through the basics, but any car boot stories and experiences by our British members or overseas visitors would be interesting, so chime in please.

 

Here we just call it a flea-market to prevent confusion.

 

Here, a flea market is a more organised event with no modern junk sellers and about 5 times the cost to stand, and usually no more frequent than monthly. It's the second tier of the antiques ladder.

 

Hi af -
I read most, but not all of what you described.
Pretty much the same as what we call a flea market.

Our flea markets are held weekly, monthly, semi annually and annually depending on where and who is holding them. Indoor and outdoor again depending on who and where sponsored.
Usually one or two day events held on Sat. and/or Sun.
There are exceptions like Quartzsite AZ. Held in the desert for I think a month each year.

 

Flea markets can be regularly held each weekend, in which you have regular vendors, often new stuff. But there is usually the out lying areas where people bring goods from home.

You can have the annual flea market put on in parking lots by service clubs who rent spaces to make money for what ever organization.
Cities and towns are known for having the annual or semi annual flea market. Many of those started in the 70s with only antique dealers or people bringing stuff from home. Some antique markets are still going. But most have morphed into a mix of old and new.

 

My local market is every Sunday morning. Some of the things I've found there are absolutely amazing.

 

A local park has started having a 'Car Boot' sale once a year and it has been a great success. They start it late, (11am) to accommodate sellers that have to travel, some coming from Victoria which is about 3 hours away. I always find some great items
I'd love to go to one in England.
http://filberg.com/boot-sale-saturday-september-26th/

 

I know of no flea market that charges so little to sell or have so few facilities. Flea markets generally have perimeter control, restrooms, and the like. The closest equivalent I have seen here is the swap meet. Some of them approach the organization of a flea market but some are held in conjunction with other organized events. For example, auto shows often have informal swap meets on the side to barter parts and the like.

I can't imagine them allowing people to just set up in a field here. Local authorities want permits, insurance, crowd control, and the like.

Question .... Do you have to have a car with a boot or can you bring a lorry?

 

The market that I go to accepts anything with an an engine and wheels! I've seen cars, trucks, removal vans, flatbeds, pick-up trucks...It's whatever you drive that can bring the stuff to market, basically. There's at least three or four people who are there on a regular basis and sell antique/vintage furniture. They show up in massive moving trucks with the lift-gates and everything.

 

Sellers can come in a van, they then pay a bit more. The bigger sales have limits on the number of refreshment/fast food vans but the burger and bacon butty boys are probably happy with this because too many outlets and no one covers costs.

A fair amount of stolen property probably changes hands, usually stuff from garden sheds like power tools, etc.
As a seller I have never noticed any personal regulation, although as I mentioned, occasionally the more market trader events will have Trading Standards people around looking for the fake stuff sold by the vanload.

The only local law involved is the Town and Country Planning Act, which restricts the amount of time agricultural land can be used for non agricultural use to so many days a year. This is to restrict what could amount to permanent non agricultural use like a caravan park.

Perimeter control? well, fields have fences and gates. Crowd control? In the circumstances the crowds control themselves. Insurance, I doubt it. What's going to happen that the organisers are responsible for anyway. The bigger sales probably have some sort of cover. The real reason these things have been so popular over the years is the lack of formality, you just turn up and sell.

There are some restrictions, you cannot sell live animals. That's all I can think of offhand.

We do have specialised informal sales, like auto jumbles and boat jumbles, obviously for those car. motorcycle or marine items, these are far less common.

 

I've never known anything to be stolen at our flea market. At least one item a week (usually something made of glass) is smashed, by a careless stallholder or an inattentive bargain-hunter. I think the worst one was some poor sod who knocked a crystal chandelier off of a chair. It hit the ground like a fragmentation grenade and glass went EVERYWHERE.

Almost anything and everything is sold at our market. Silverware, antiques, bric-a-brac, cutlery, brassware, ivory, books, DVDs, clothing, furniture, jewelry...

Occasionally we'll have a couple of local constables wandering through the market to keep an eye on things, but other than that, it's very much the-stallholder-takes-the-risk.

I've never known anyone to actually steal anything at the market, although I'm sure it does happen. The biggest controversy was some guy selling militaria and he got in hot water with the management or something because someone objected to his Nazi stuff. I remember it hit the local newspapers.

 

Oh my goodness, can't you just see it if we all saved up money for year(s) to go to England for an "antiquers forum" trip featuring car boot sales and anything else Davey and Afantiques might recommend in and around their stomping ground(s).

Could you get on board with that Davey and Afantiques?????

 

Fabulous idea yourturn, I'm all for it

 

in Denmark we dont have words that differentiate the levels of antiqueing on markets apart from 2. loppemarked, which is litterally flea market, and antikmarked, antique market. we also have something called a kræmmermarked, but that usually not anything in relation to antiques, or even retro/vintage. a kræmmermarked is litterally a junk sale, where old electronics, and importet chinese plastic stuff fills the stalls along side dozen upon dozen of identical plain flower pots, and the occational garden tools and a bike.

previously i went to a weekly fleamarked on an open harbor area in a city a bit north of my own village, every stand was marked and were 3x3 meters, and there was a basement underneath for parking (that was a public one that just happended to be free parking on sundays, yaay~) and that market is what i would call equal to a carboot sale in Denmark, because people arived with their car, unloaded, parked, set up stall, and it was with everything from decluttering sales, to semi profesional dealers, and there even was this army veteran who had 2 entire stalls filled only with vintage toy cars my own stand usually featured a decent mix of glass, both antique vintage and modern, silver flatware and jewelery (which i luckily had in a display case gennerously given to me by my fathers friend who is a retired watchmaker), vintage pottery, misc metal things, and my usual box on the floor with bags of misc flatware in bags for 1£ each those bags were always a big hit~ all the other stands had pieces singled out for between 20p and 1£ each, but they never sold any of it i almost sold all my flatware every time~

 

Oh my goodness, can't you just see it if we all saved up money for year(s) to go to England for an "antiquers forum" trip featuring car boot sales and anything else Davey and Afantiques might recommend in and around their stomping ground(s).


I could have an open day in the shed.

 

Now That works, Af!

 

Afantiques, a guided-by-you tour of your shed would, I am sure, make the entire trip beyond imagination for those of us wanting to "go British."

 

Never mind race day, what about car boot day?

Here is one I have sold at.

 

this is why i am going to live in england~ i know you have horrible weather 9 out of... well 9 out of 9 times, but hey~ i like your marked culture and your auction culture