Find it on Freecycle

If you’re after a new furniture head to Freecycle or Gumtree and sift through all of the adverts. Furniture is often free, or super cheap, to those willing to collect it. You never know, someone might be trying to get rid of the sofa of your dreams.

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It’s the same story in the final London-themed section, where a big interactive map on a screen highlights 25 worthy initiatives across the city, from Open Data Camden – a project to put 300 different datasets online, on everything from parking bays and planning applications to housing stock and road accidents – to Museum Freecycle in Kennington, a hub that allows museums to share unwanted items. The captions and photos that pop up on the screen will thankfully be augmented by real life discussions every Thursday, when each of the 25 groups will host a lunchtime event.

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I admit to owning close to 100 pairs of shoes and that I could go for a couple of months of not doing laundry before I’d run out of clean underwear. I live in an age of super abundance, and it is this super abundance that helps organization like The Freecycle Network thrive and keeps Goodwill stores stocked with merchandise. (If you’ve never heard of Freecycle, it is a free member-organization where people post items they have extra of or would like to donate and others post what they need to see if anyone can fulfill that need. The objective is to keep stuff out of landfills.)

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A cheaper option may be Gumtree or Freecycle — a website where people give things away. Freecycle is inevitably random — new posts recently ranged from rose bushes and an upright piano to square crockery, 30 bags of plaster and costume jewellery. But while the rain pours down, I have time to wait.

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