People turn from banks to pawnbrokers

A new pawnbrokers has sprung up in Plymouth and the owner has called his shop an alternative to banking.

More and more people are shrugging off the old stigma attached to the traditional pawnbrokers shop and are now seeing it as an alternative to a high street bank.

And the credit crunch has certainly had an impact according to John Horton who has just set up his own pawnbroking shop in Plymouth.

"The banks are reluctant to deal with certain people and so a lot more pawnbroking shops are opening up around the country, " he said.

John thought about setting up his pawnbroking shop a while ago after spending many years in the second-hand business.

He said people see it as short-term finance: "When people make money they might treat themselves to something nice.

"Then a couple of years down the line when things aren't so good they look at it and think I could part with that for a few months just to tide me over the bad times."

It's a simple system of temporarily turning your collateral into cash.

Pawnbrokers have been around for centuries. The earliest are thought to have been in China 3,000 years ago.

More recently Christopher Columbus might not have discovered the Americas if his trip had not been paid for by the Queen of Spain, who is said to have pawned her jewels.

Through the ages it has been poorer people who have used the pawnbrokers to swap bed linen, cutlery and clothes for money.

The children's nursery rhyme, Pop Goes the Weasel is all about pawn shops.

John said: "What you might not realise is that 'pop' or pop-shop was the name given to a pawnbrokers, and weasel is the rhyming slang for coat (weasel and stoat) and it was often coats that got pawned."

John said he's been surprised at the level of pawns: "We thought we would be lending people a few quid here and there, but people are coming in for quite substantial amounts of money."

He added: "Probably 90% of our customers come back and redeem their goods and it's in the pawnbrokers interest for them to do that, so that they can come back and do it again."

John's shop still has the famous pawnbrokers symbol of three golden balls hanging off a bar. But they've been updated and have a more contemporary look in keeping with the 21st century.

It's a far cry from the 70s when there were about 50 pawn shops across the country.

Now that figure is more than 1,000. But John feels it will never be as many as at the turn of the century: "It will never get back to the 4,500 there once was."

Still for this high street shop business is booming and in this case whatever you see glittering in the window could certainly be gold.