I have turned up to boot sales at every hour there is, and I have worked out that the hour decides what you come home with. Not the field. The hour.

A boot sale is not one long morning of the same things sitting there waiting for you. It moves in waves, and each wave takes something different off the tables. Turn up at the wrong point in that and you are picking through what nobody else wanted, wondering why everyone keeps telling you boot sales are worth it.

So I wrote it down properly. Four windows through a Saturday morning, what is realistically still there in each one, and what has already gone if you arrive after it.

What is in it

  • Before the gates are meant to open, and why the odd feeling of it is the point
  • The first hour, the only time you see everything laid out at once
  • Mid-morning, when prices soften and sellers have time to talk
  • The last hour, when nobody wants to lift it back into the car
  • What I would do if I only got one Saturday a month for this

Send me the guide

Put your name and email in and I will send it over. You will also get my occasional email about what I have found. Not often, nothing to buy, and you can unsubscribe any time without offending me.

Free. A PDF, about ten minutes to read. No charge, now or later. Privacy notice.

Who is writing this

Lucy Harper lifting a box from a car boot before the light is up

I am Lucy. I am 28 and I live in Hastings. I spend my weekends at markets and car boots, I never spend much, and I almost always come home with something worth talking about. I am not a dealer and I am not up at five every weekend. I worked this out by getting it wrong a lot.

The hour most people never see

A nearly empty field at the end of a car boot sale, tables being folded away
The last hour. Prices come down not because the thing is worth less, but because nobody wants to lift it back into the car.

Send me the guide

Do you sell at markets or boot sales rather than shop at them? I wrote a different guide for that side of the table: What Makes Me Stop, twelve stalls and the four I stopped at. You can also see both guides here.