'I just thought they were brilliant': Meet the woman with a unique interest in plastic carrier bags

• Video report by ITV News Correspondent Dean Thomas-Welch

A woman from Aberdare with a rather unique interest in plastic bags has explained how her hobby has connected her with people across the world.

Angela Clarke, 55, has collected a staggering 10,000 plastic carrier bags over the years and stores them in a purpose-built space in her husband's factory.

It was in 1976, in the run-up to the Queen's Silver Jubilee, when Angela was an 11-year-old girl, that she began the hobby of collecting bags.

"Everybody was putting the union flag everywhere and everything was highly decorated, more so than we've seen from the past couple of Jubilees," Angela said.

"So most of the shops brought out carrier bags with the union flag or the Queen on.

"I just thought they were brilliant, so my mother encouraged me to get them so we could decorate our windows, it was a quite a cheap way of getting a union flag and putting it in your window."

Angela recalls the time her father brought back a black carrier bag with a silver crinoline lady on it from his travels to Jersey with a present in it.

She liked the bag so much she hung it up in her room as a poster and says it was the one that ignited a lifelong hobby.

There were two main reasons why she started, she said, one being because it was a cheap hobby as the bags ranged from two to three pence and, secondly, they were easy to collect.

She said: "Quite often I would put them in my bedroom and they had lovely patterns on and some even had pop stars of the days on them, like David Soul.

"They were cheap and easy to collect, you could hang them up, as I say to people, they were modern art of the time."

A year after beginning her collection, Angela had amassed 200 carrier bags, with some from various stores such as F. W. Woolworth which are no longer around.

At the time, there was a popular BBC Children's programme on TV on a Saturday morning presented by Noel Edmonds: Multicolored Swap Shop.

The show asked if anyone had any unusual hobbies or collected any unusual things, so Angela wrote in and said she had a collection of carrier bags.

Angela ended up traveling from Aberdare to London to feature on the show.

She said: "The whole collection just snowballed after I went on the show, the BBC had hundreds of bags sent in for me.

"I had bags sent in autographed by designers, bags sent in from the House Of Lords by someone who actually took the House Of Lords carrier bag from the gift shop and signed it and sent it to me with a letter from the House Of Lords."

She added: "Somebody went abroad for the Olympics and remembered that I'd been on Swap Shop and got in touch, so I started having bags from abroad.

"This was a time when package holidays weren't as popular as they are now. Aberdare was a small place, everyone knew everybody and people would go away on holiday and bring back a carrier bag for me so I started getting bags from around the world."

She added: "Shops started closing and things moved on and I thought I've got pieces of history here of shops that were once loved, shops like C&A, Woolworth, BHS (British Home Stores), Fine Fair, and Lipton."

Angela holds bags from once-loved Welsh shops such as Paradise, David Morgan, and Allders.

She said: "I've got Tesco's throughout the years, right from silver jubilee, I've got Asda bags when Asda first started and places from abroad like JCPenney.

"I've got Disney throughout the years. You're highly unlikely to get a Disney bag now because they've shut all the stores.

"I've got a bag with the twin towers in New York. It was sent to me. I've got bags from Hong Kong when it was territory of the British Empire."

Angela's oldest carrier bag is from 1954, a pink and white striped carrier bag that holds her mother's veil when she married that year.

"I'm not supposed to add anymore according to my husband but I just can't resist," she said.

"If I see something and think that's unusual, I'm going to add that to the collection. I used to collect every different one but now I only collect unusual or special ones like jubilees."

Despite potentially sitting on a handsome sum of money due to some old carrier bags selling for hundreds of pounds, Anglea says she will never part company with her collection.

She said: "They are still mine, they are my babies but I do joke with the kids that it's up to them what they do with them."