Royal Trinity Putney Charity Shop: Sunday Vintage Browsing

Mary's Living & Giving is open every day at 109 Regents Park Road, London NW1 8UR, from 10am to 6pm Monday to Saturday and from 12pm to 4pm on Sunday. It is the Primrose Hill shop of Save the Children, and the charity's own page calls it "a fantastic place to hang out" as well as a place to buy pre-loved things. If you are searching for a charity shop in this corner of north London, this is the one that treats the rails like a boutique.

Regents Park Road is the village high street of Primrose Hill, a stretch of independent grocers, bakeries and clothes shops that runs north from the park towards Chalk Farm. Number 109 sits on that run, so you can reach it on foot from Chalk Farm station in a few minutes or walk down from the summit of Primrose Hill itself.

The shop is part of a small group of Mary's Living & Giving boutiques, which Save the Children runs under the name of the retail expert Mary Portas. Save the Children says the first ever Mary's Living & Giving shop opened in Stockbridge, Edinburgh, in 2009, and that Portas began working with the charity in 2008, when a BBC series saw her overhaul the charity's worst-performing store in Orpington. The Primrose Hill branch is one of the London descendants of that experiment.

Country & Town House, in its guide to London charity shops, described this branch as a magnificently quirky and colourful store with walls lined with pre-loved garments, and that matches the way the shop presents itself. Instead of a jumble of hangers sorted only by size, the clothes are edited and grouped, so a rail of coats looks like a rail in a small independent boutique rather than a donation bin. The effect is that you can scan a wall in a minute and know whether anything is worth pulling out.

Because the stock is donated, nothing repeats from one week to the next, and that is the real reason to visit more than once. A Tuesday morning rail will not look like a Saturday afternoon rail, and the shop is in a neighbourhood where the donations tend to be well cared for. Work through the dresses and coats first, then look sideways at the bags, shoes and accessories near the till, which people often walk past on the way to the fitting area.

Prices are not published on the Save the Children shop page, so there is no honest figure to quote here. What you can do is turn a few tags over as you browse. The sensible test in any boutique-style charity shop is whether the item would cost noticeably more new, and with good wool coats and silk blouses the answer is usually yes.

Sunday is the awkward day, because the shop opens only from 12pm to 4pm, which gives you four hours rather than eight. That is long enough if you arrive close to noon, when the week's new donations have been put out and the shop is calmer than it will be at Saturday lunchtime. If you have a specific item in mind, such as a winter coat, Monday to Friday after 10am is the quieter slot.

Judgement call: if you only want basics such as plain knitwear or jeans, you are probably better off in a larger charity superstore, because this shop's strength is the edited, one-off piece. If you want something you will not see on anyone else on the Tube, the narrow boutique format works in your favour, since the staff clearly choose what goes on the floor rather than putting out everything they are given.

Charity shops depend on the people who run them, and this one runs on volunteers and staff who know the stock. Ask whether something similar to what you want has come in, or whether they have seen a particular brand recently. The shop is also a way to give as well as take: bring a bag of clean, good-quality clothes and ask at the till how the shop wants them handed over.

Once you have shopped, the rest of the visit writes itself. Walk to the top of Primrose Hill for the view back across the London skyline, then drop down through the park towards Regent's Park and its Outer Circle. On the other side of the shop, Chalk Farm Road leads to Camden Lock if you want a louder afternoon, while Regents Park Road itself has the bakeries and delis that make this a good lunch stop between two rounds of rail-flicking.

The neighbourhood is known for its pastel terraces and for the creative people who have lived here, and the pre-loved clothes tend to reflect that: a good deal of tailoring, natural fibres and one-off prints rather than fast-fashion basics. That is why a charity boutique on this street can feel different from one in a high-street parade, and why it rewards a slow look rather than a ten-minute dash.

Address: 109 Regents Park Road, Primrose Hill, London NW1 8UR. Opening hours from the Save the Children shop page: Monday 10am to 6pm, Tuesday 10am to 6pm, Wednesday 10am to 6pm, Thursday 10am to 6pm, Friday 10am to 6pm, Saturday 10am to 6pm, Sunday 12pm to 4pm. The nearest station is Chalk Farm on the Northern line, a short walk away.

Plan your route with Karpo APP if you want to build a day around the shop, pairing it with the park, a coffee on Regents Park Road and a look at the other independent boutiques nearby. Go with a rough list of what you are hunting for, leave room in your bag, and treat anything you do not buy as a reason to come back next week, because this is a shop whose rails really do change.

If the shop is crowded when you arrive, do a slow lap of the outer walls first and come back to the middle later. If you are bringing donations, keep them clean and in good condition, since this shop sells to people who are buying for the label and the fabric. And if you find nothing this time, you have still supported a children's charity just by walking in and looking around.