On a cold Friday afternoon in July, Wambui is standing in the doorway of her roadside shop scrolling on her tablet. The street outside is empty. A woman wrapped in a Maasai shawl sits in a white plastic chair inside the shop. In front of her are plastic toys, vacuum cleaners, and electronic cutting equipment. A CCTV camera is mounted in the ceiling.

The shop is on a busy street in Ngara, Nairobi, and as I approach, Wambui calls to me to have a look at her wares.

“UK fridges are of high quality,” says the shopkeeper. A small refrigerator with no brand name is going for KSh20,000. “But I’ll sell it to you for KSh18,000. It is the best I can do,” she says.

Wambui has been in the business of selling imported second-hand appliances for about a decade. She says it is impossible to recall the number of cooling appliances she has sold, all imported from the UK through a middleman.

Inside the freezer compartment of one of the fridges are phone numbers in blue; 0870 is a premium help number for Domestic and General, a repair company in the United Kingdom, 0121 is a Birmingham number for spares. Birmingham is the United Kingdom’s second largest city.