Secondhand Record Shop Near Me in Islington: Flashback Records

Flashback Records keeps its best secondhand vinyl downstairs. The Islington shop sits at 50 Essex Road, London N1 8LR, in a parade set back a little from the main road, and it has been open since 1997. If you are hunting for a secondhand record shop near me in north London, this is the one locals send you to: new records on the ground floor, a basement of used and collector LPs below, and doors open from 10 am to 7 pm every day of the week.

Owner Mark Burgess set up Flashback in Islington, and the shop began by dealing mainly in secondhand stock before new vinyl was added later. Burgess told the local paper Islington Now in 2013 that the business was thriving mainly through selling vinyl, with CDs and DVDs alongside. The Essex Road branch is still the original, and it set the template for the two branches that followed.

The second Flashback opened in Crouch End in 2006, taking over from Listen Records, which had traded on the same spot for many years; it moved to larger premises on Topsfield Parade in August 2021. The Shoreditch branch followed in 2014 on Bethnal Green Road, at the top of Brick Lane. All three still buy and sell records, but Islington is where the collector basement first earned the chain its reputation.

The shop's own description of the downstairs room is a well-organised treasure trove of second-hand and collectors vinyl, and that is accurate. Upstairs is for new pressings, CDs and DVDs, and plenty of visitors never get past it. Go straight to the stairs. The basement is vinyl only, and the crates are filed tightly by genre, so you can work through a whole section in one pass instead of flipping through random boxes on the floor.

Time Out singles out the jazz, soul and hip hop sections, plus a shelf of library music that producers regularly raid for samples. The Vinyl Factory's guide to London shops says Flashback is strongest at the weirder fringes, with dedicated krautrock, library and soundtrack sections. That is a useful clue to the regulars: beatmakers with a list of breaks, older collectors filling gaps in a label run, and students buying their first pressing of something they found on a playlist.

Flashback lists much of its used stock online with the label, catalogue number, country, year and condition grade, which gives a fair picture of shop prices. On a recent look, a UK 1973 Tamla Motown pressing of Stevie Wonder's Talking Book was £15, a 1976 UK Mercury copy of Rush's 2112 with gatefold sleeve was £20, and Ultravox's Vienna on Chrysalis from 1980 was £12. A 1979 Warrior pressing of Sugar Minott's Bitter Sweet sat at £10.

Grades follow the usual record and sleeve format, so VG/VG+ means a very good disc in a slightly better sleeve. One honest note: the famous titles are not bargains. A Parlophone copy of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was £45, which is fair for the pressing but not a steal. The better value is in the dance 12-inch bins and 7-inch singles, where a Thurston Moore single from The Daydream Library Series was listed at £8.

There is no queue to get in and no booking, but the basement is a small room and the aisles fill with bags and coats. Keep the records you are considering in a neat stack rather than across the top of a crate, and file anything you decide against back where it came from. A jazz LP left in the soul crate is effectively lost to the next buyer.

Opening time at 10 am on a weekday gives you the room at its emptiest, before the after-work and weekend browsers arrive. Set yourself one genre and one budget before you go down, because the cross-filed sections make it easy to drift from soundtracks to library to krautrock and lose an hour. If a sleeve has no grade sticker or the condition looks off, ask at the counter; staff can tell you how the record was graded before you pay.

Flashback buys vinyl, CDs, cassette tapes and other physical media collections of any size, in all genres. For collections outside London or too big to carry, there is a form on the website to request a visit.

One rule catches people out: photo ID is required to sell, as UK law demands, so bring a passport or driving licence with the records. Clean sleeves and keep inner bags where you can, since the grade on each item decides what it is worth to the shop. Sorting a box by genre before you arrive also speeds up the valuation at the counter.

The shop is a short walk from Islington Green, where Essex Road splits off from Upper Street, and Angel on the Northern line is the nearest Tube station. Make a loop of it: walk south past the green toward Angel and cut into Camden Passage, the narrow lane of antique dealers and vintage stalls that runs behind Upper Street. Old prints, glassware and secondhand books there suit the same kind of browsing you just did underground.

If the basement leaves you wanting more soul, jazz and reggae specifically, the Shoreditch Flashback on Bethnal Green Road has a basement dedicated to those three genres and regular in-store gigs, and it is an easy bus ride east. Crouch End, on Topsfield Parade, is the branch to try if you are already in north London, and its 2021 move gave it more space for new and used vinyl.

Flashback Islington is at 50 Essex Road, Islington, London N1 8LR. All three London branches open 10 am to 7 pm daily and close only on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day. On Record Store Day the shops open from 9 am, so arrive early if you are after a limited release.

Go if you collect jazz, soul, hip hop, library music or soundtracks, or if you want a single well-organised room rather than a sprawling warehouse. Skip the ground floor if you came only for used records. Bring photo ID if you are selling, and a sturdy tote if you plan to carry a stack of LPs back along Upper Street to the Tube.