A NEW antique and vintage shop is opening in Shipley this month.
The store called The Yorkshire Flea is due to open on Kirkgate on June 25 and will sell antique goods, vintage magazines, unusual furniture and glassware items.
Ben Wray and his wife Helen Bowman are opening the shop as a joint venture, to pursue their love of all things vintage.
Ben said: “I just love the antique industry because you can’t order the stuff online, you can’t go into a supermarket to pick stuff up, someone like me has to go out, find it, refurbish, restore and polish it ready to be sold again.”
“In a world full of Amazon, we want to supply stuff and open a shop where there are faces you know, in the community and we’re very excited about the city of culture bid as well."
The new store will stock a host of antique and vintage products, including vintage football programmes, glassware dating back to 1910, and some small furniture items.
“We want to make the store accessible and affordable, so our products range from a few quid for some magazines, to a few hundred quid for furniture items,” Ben added.
“We also offer a bit of a personal experience as we know where everything has come from, if people want a bit of the history where their item has come from, we can give that.”
Ben and Helen have been involved in the antique industry for decades as they previously ran the Yorkshire Antiques and Art Fair at the Harrogate Showground from 2009 to 2018 and the Stafford Bingley Hall antique fair at Stafford Showground from 1979 to 2018.
Ben added: “I’ve always been interested in history, I’ve always had an interest in interesting things from the past, and things that you don’t see often.
“I started buying and selling clothes and ceramics from the Queen's Hall in Leeds and the market in Bradford years and years ago. We like the stuff and we like the magazines because they give you a real window back in time, and I just love handling objects.
“The Vintage clothes tend to be well made, look good when they fit me and they’re distinctive as well. And you can’t go into the supermarket to pick them up either.”
On opening the new shop, Ben said he is ‘terrified and excited at the same time.'
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