Who doesn’t love a flea market (or car boot sales as we’d call them in the UK)? And one of the many unknown delights of moving to Denmark is that it seems to be the home of the flea market.

It’s not always easy to take full advantage of a flea market, and those tales of finding something really special at a market are vastly outnumbered by the sheer amount of rubbish that occupies most stalls. But despite that, I find them a bit like museums – museums of real life, with no descriptions or dates, but just a hint of the story behind each piece. I could literally spend hours looking at a single stall.

At the moment, with the move in to our new flat only three weeks away, we’ve actually got good reason for going to flea markets, as we’re looking for some specific pieces of furniture and don’t want modern versions of them. One of these is a kitchen cupboard – something with some glass in the door, that we can keep lots of stuff in, but will look nice in the corner and not just practical. Here it’s called a vitrineskab (essentially, a glass doored cupboard).

And so it was that we set off from our new base for the week on Islands Brygge, housesitting for our friends Signe & Anders while they’re on holiday, to what we thought was a large, permanent flea market out in a warehouse at the old docks to the east of central Copenhagen, called B&W Loppemarked. And wow, we weren’t wrong. This place was HUGE. The whole industrial area was almost deserted at the weekend except for a few people we passed who had already bagged themselves a piece of old furniture, and when we got inside it still wasn’t especially busy, despite the market only being open every other weekend. That quiet feeling only added to the mysterious feeling in when wandering around the quiet, cold aisles.

The pictures below do it more justice than I can with words, but it was mountain upon mountain of chairs, tables, cupboards, sideboards, and of course a million other smaller things, from fairground rides, to station clocks (both pictured below) and old LPs, boxes, lamps – everything.

We hit gold though, and as is the way of these things, it was in the last stall we managed to visit before it shut at 4pm. The pale cupboard below with the small solgt sticker on is now ours. A perfect end to a great trip. And they had a hotdog stand. Amazing.

I would genuinely put this place in my top five recommendations for any friends visiting – if you like flea markets, that is.