My mother said 'Darlings, you've done the right thing, opening a vintage clothing shop; nothing short of a nuclear war is going to stop women buying clothes.' Or trying to, at any rate. 

It's just sometimes the High Street of Great Britain can get a little dull. It's Monsoon, Gap and Warehouse from John o' Groats to Lands End, and the same old bucket of suds in Starbucks - you could be anywhere. And the clothes are good or bad from year to year, but they all come in lines and they're all a bit the same.

If rock & roll ran out of chords sometime in the 1970s, then fashion's got a bigger problem
- white's been the new summer colour for at least a thousand years. It's all been done before, over and over again. It is now standard practice to choose next season's look by searching back through the years. A design is discovered from twenty years ago, and some variations added to bring it up to date - hold it on the hips and lose it on the legs; focus on the midriff and cool it on the bum... All you really need is a good source of old ideas.

A vintage clothing shop is a sort of hands-on museum. Every article is different - no, we don't have the same in size ten but there's a blue one a bit like it in a similar sort of pattern - and the customers can mix and match to create their own fashions for the designers to copy and the magazines to write about.

People are no longer content to buy the same as everyone else: they want to make a FIND. And Church Street, with its dozens of small independent shops, is a good place to start. There are records, books, clothes and shoes that can't be found in the chainstores. There's furniture, jewelry and bric a brac, with cafes that serve decent coffee and bake cakes on the premises.  If you've never been, you're in for a surprise; there can't be more than a dozen streets like this in the whole of London. There's a park to walk the kids and the dogs and it's not even in the Congestion Zone yet.

Mortimer is a partner in Ribbons & Taylor on Church Street

Paul Foot, campaigning journalist and one of Stoke Newington's best-known residents, died on 18 July, aged 66. Born into the Foot political dynasty - his father was governor of Jamaica and uncle Michael leader of the Labour Party - Paul became a left-wing socialist when he worked for the Daily Record in Glasgow in the early 1960s.

He went on to write scathing exposés of corruption and financial scandals for the Daily Mirror and Private Eye. More recently, his column in the Guardian didn't pull any punches when it came to fat cats, Blairites, privatisers, tax evaders, and dodgy dealers in business and government. But, unlike some on the far left, he exuded a personal warmth and sincerity that impressed even those he had skewered in print.

I interviewed him for N16 in 2002, when he was standing for Mayor of Hackney, and he became extremely animated about local issues, particularly about the need for secular,
publicly-funded schools. It's likely that he wouldn't have adapted well to the life of
a politician as compromise was not something he appreciated. His loss will be felt deeply, and not only by his family, friends and colleagues. The wider world of journalism and its readers will be much poorer without his talent and commitment.