West Sussex Readers: Free Doorstep Book Collection

If your shelves are overflowing and you want to donate books in West Sussex without leaving the house, Anglo Doorstep Collections comes straight to your door — free of charge, no minimum quantity, and nothing to arrange beyond a quick online booking. Paperbacks, hardbacks, children’s picture books, cookbooks, DVDs, films, CDs and music albums are all welcome, so whether you have one bag of novels or a loft’s worth of accumulated reading, the process is exactly the same.

West Sussex has a particular kind of reading culture — coastal towns like Worthing and Chichester with their independent bookshops, market towns like Horsham where households accumulate titles over decades, and a county population approaching 867,000 people who between them own an extraordinary number of books. When the shelves finally overflow, or a house move forces the question of what actually comes with you, we offer the simplest answer: we come to your door and take your books and media away for you.

How the Collection Works

What We Collect

Pack your items in small, manageable bags or boxes — there’s no minimum quantity, so a single bag of paperbacks is just as welcome as a full shelf’s worth. We accept:

Covering West Sussex — Coast, Town and Countryside

West Sussex stretches from the South Downs to the English Channel, taking in busy commuter towns, quiet coastal communities and everything in between. A doorstep collection model suits this geography particularly well — there’s no requirement to travel to a drop-off point, which in a county where many communities are spread out or lack convenient public transport links makes a real practical difference. We collect right across West Sussex, including Crawley, Worthing, Horsham and Chichester, so whether you’re in a seafront flat or a rural village, booking works the same way.

One aspect of West Sussex life that catches people out is the weather. A damp coastal autumn or a sudden downpour on collection day can quickly damage books left outside for too long. We send your collection time slot through the evening before your collection day, which means you can time exactly when to put your bags out — keeping everything dry until the last sensible moment rather than leaving items on a step for hours. A weatherproof bag or a spot inside a porch makes all the difference on an unpredictable South Coast morning.

Who Tends to Book

Families in West Sussex often find that a clear-out becomes a whole-household effort — children’s picture books outgrown by one sibling, cookbooks that no longer reflect how the family eats, a stack of DVDs replaced by streaming services, and a loft full of hardbacks that came out of boxes when you moved in and never quite found a permanent home. Tackling all of that in one go, rather than drip-feeding it to a charity shop over months, is genuinely more satisfying — and a free doorstep collection makes it far more likely to actually happen. Splitting mixed items into separate, manageable bags (books in one, discs in another) makes loading easier on the day and keeps everything in better condition until we arrive.

Downsizing is another common trigger in West Sussex, particularly in coastal towns where retiring households are reorganising space that no longer needs to accommodate large family collections. A lifetime of reading can occupy a remarkable amount of shelf space, and letting go of books that genuinely won’t be reread is easier when you know they’re going somewhere useful rather than into a skip. The same applies to inherited collections — clearing the home of a family member can feel emotionally complicated, and knowing that the books will be read again by someone who discovers them through a charity or reuse outlet is, for many people, a genuinely comforting thought.

One Visit Covers It All

Books and media are rarely the only items you’re looking to move on. Set them out alongside clothes, toys or kitchenware and our driver takes everything in a single trip — there’s no need to arrange separate collections or make separate journeys. If the volume is particularly large, we can split it across more than one visit without any difficulty. Either way, you’ll receive your collection time slot the evening before, so you know exactly when to expect us and can plan accordingly.

We also collect from nearby Crawley and Chichester — or visit our collections near you page to see the full picture across West Sussex.

What Happens to Your Donations

Every readable title and every playable disc goes to the charities and reuse partners we work with, where items are resold or passed directly to new readers and viewers. A large percentage of proceeds goes to charity, meaning that clearing a few shelves at home contributes real funding to good causes — far beyond what happens when those same books go into general waste. Only items genuinely too damaged for further use are considered for recycling, and that’s very much a last resort rather than a default.

There is a meaningful environmental case for choosing reuse over disposal, and it’s worth understanding what it actually means for a place like West Sussex. When books, CDs and DVDs end up in landfill, the paper, card and plastic in them break down slowly and release methane — a greenhouse gas considerably more potent than CO₂ over the short term. Reusing those items avoids that process entirely. Based on published UK estimates from sources such as WRAP, reusing books means no new pulping, no fresh print runs, no manufacturing transport — and a genuine saving in both water use and carbon emissions compared with producing equivalent new copies. Across a county population approaching 867,000 people, the cumulative effect of West Sussex households choosing to donate rather than discard is genuinely significant. It also helps keep the county tidier: unwanted items that have a clear, convenient route to reuse are far less likely to end up as fly-tipping on rural lanes or in overfull street bins. Supporting a local circular economy — where good items stay in use for longer rather than being replaced with newly manufactured ones — is one of the more straightforward contributions any household can make.

There is also a subtler benefit to pre-owned books that’s easy to overlook: they often carry a richness that new copies don’t. A secondhand novel with a previous owner’s name inside, or a cookery book with pencil notes in the margins, arrives with a kind of history. For the next reader, that can be part of the appeal — and it’s one more reason why keeping books circulating within communities like West Sussex makes more sense than treating them as disposable.

“In a county as varied as West Sussex — from the South Downs to the coast, from Crawley to Chichester — keeping books and media in circulation rather than sending them to landfill makes a genuinely significant difference, both for local good causes and for the environment.”