Spare Trainers and Boots in Hull? Free Doorstep Pickup

Open a cupboard in most Hull houses and you’ll find a small graveyard of footwear — trainers a child has grown out of, boots swapped for a newer pair, heels worn once to a wedding and never again. Anglo Doorstep Collections exists to stop that footwear sitting there for another year, offering a free doorstep collection for shoes, trainers and boots across the city, so they can go on to a new owner and raise money for good causes along the way.

A pair of shoes left at the back of the wardrobe helps nobody; the same pair worn again helps both a stranger and the planet.

Hull’s homes, and a few more besides

We collect across Hull itself and from several of its closest neighbours.

With a population of around 260,000, Hull generates a steady supply of unworn footwear every week — more than enough to make a real difference when it is gathered up rather than binned. We also collect from Cottingham, Hessle and Beverley, so the service reaches well beyond the city boundary into the wider East Yorkshire area. Wherever you are in that patch, the arrangement is the same: a free doorstep collection, no drop-off required, and nothing to pay.

House moves bring a lot of this to the surface. So does downsizing, a loft clear-out, or simply a spring clean that finally gets round to the shed and the space under the stairs. Footwear has a habit of multiplying quietly in all of these spots, and a clear-out is usually the only time anyone notices how much has built up unworn.

What we’ll happily take off your hands

If it’s wearable, it’s welcome — the test is simple.

We collect trainers and running shoes, Chelsea boots, UGGs, knee-high and walking boots, sandals and flip-flops, high heels and wedges, smart shoes for work or special occasions, wellies, slippers, and footwear in both adult and children’s sizes. The rule of thumb is straightforward: if you’d be happy to hand the pair to a friend, they’re in good enough condition for us to collect.

Outdated styles are no barrier. A pair of boots that’s gone out of fashion in your own wardrobe may well be exactly what someone else is after, and footwear doesn’t need to be current to be useful — it just needs to still do its job.

Getting a bag ready

A few minutes of preparation means every pair arrives ready to be worn again.

Preparing footwear for collection takes very little effort, and a bit of care means more of what you give away is wearable rather than wasted.

• Keep pairs together — tie laces to each other or wrap an elastic band round them so they don’t get separated in the bag.
• Knock off mud, give them a wipe, and let them dry fully before bagging.
• Bag or box shoes separately from clothing donations, and mark the bag “shoes” so our driver knows exactly what’s inside.
• Have a proper look in the loft, the shed, under the stairs and the back of wardrobes — footwear turns up in all of them.

Sort once, and the same bag can carry school shoes a child has outgrown, wellies that let in water, and heels that never quite got worn twice.

Booking and the collection itself

The process is built to fit around your day, not the other way round.

Booking takes a couple of minutes online, after which you simply bag your pairs, note on the bag that it’s a donation, and leave it out on the day. You don’t need to wait in — leave the bag on the doorstep or wherever suits, mention the spot in your booking notes, and we’ll collect directly from there. We send your collection time slot the evening before, so you’ll know roughly when to expect us without having to keep the whole day free. It’s a system built for people fitting a clear-out around work, school runs or simply a busy week.

Children’s shoes that barely touched the ground

Growing feet mean some of the least-worn footwear in the house belongs to the youngest member of the family.

Clearing out a child’s room often turns up the best examples of barely-worn footwear in the whole house — school shoes outgrown within a term, trainers worn for a single summer, wellies that still have years of puddle-jumping left in them. Because children grow so quickly, this is one of the few areas of the home where “nearly new” is the rule rather than the exception. Pass them into the same bag as the rest of your donation and they’ll get a second childhood with someone else.

Where the real value lies

One pair makes a small difference; a city’s worth of pairs adds up to something bigger.

Shoes are genuinely awkward to recycle. Most pairs are glued together from leather, rubber, foam and synthetic layers that can’t easily be pulled apart again, which is why an estimated 85% of shoes thrown away in the UK end up in landfill, and fewer than 5% of worn-out shoes worldwide are ever recycled. Worldwide, around 23.9 billion pairs of shoes were made in 2024 alone, and making just one typical pair of running shoes is estimated to produce around 14 kg of CO2. Wearing a pair again, rather than buying new, is thought to avoid that 14 kg or so of CO2 outright — and because recycling genuinely isn’t a reliable back-up for most footwear, reuse is by far the best outcome for a pair that still has life left in it.

No single bag of trainers changes those figures on its own, but a steady pattern of households across Hull choosing to donate rather than bin adds up to a meaningful difference over time. It’s the cumulative effect of lots of ordinary clear-outs, not one dramatic gesture, that keeps footwear out of landfill at any scale worth mentioning.

There’s a tidier-streets angle too. Unwanted bags of belongings left out informally or dumped rather than donated can contribute to fly-tipping, something Hull City Council and residents alike would rather see less of. A free, scheduled doorstep collection gives that footwear somewhere proper to go, keeps the city a little tidier, and means the local economy around Hull benefits from the funds it helps raise rather than losing that value to landfill.

A simpler approach to what you own

Fewer, better-used belongings suits more households than you’d think.

Plenty of people clearing out footwear are moving toward owning less generally — not necessarily a strict minimalist approach, just a preference for a wardrobe that holds only what actually gets worn. Shoes are an easy place to start, since it’s usually obvious within seconds which pairs earn their space and which have sat untouched for a year or more. Donating the rest means someone else gets genuine use from them, rather than them taking up room doing nothing.

More from the same clear-out

Footwear is rarely the only thing that turns up once you start sorting.

A shoe clear-out tends to uncover other things worth passing on. We also collect clothes, linen and towels, books, toys, household items and kitchenware in Hull, all collected on the same visit so there’s no need to book separately for each category. If you’re outside our immediate patch of Hull, Cottingham, Hessle and Beverley, our collections near you page covers the full list of areas we reach.