IN A LONG, thin unit on a tidy industrial estate deep in the heart of London’s commuter belt, it’s confession time. Tracy Whitehead, 42, won’t reveal how much she has spent on her hobby since her first foray seven years ago, in case her husband reads this. Though, with a bit of pushing, she does admit to having blown around £600 on it during a recent trip to the US.

Another enthusiast, 35-year-old Sarah, says: “During the first year I got into it, I spent more than £5,000 buying stash. It should come with a Government health warning.” Lynne Embery, 52, adds: “And a wealth warning.”

It might sound like a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, but the “stash” in question is not drugs, it’s what these women call the paraphernalia they each collect for making scrapbooks. And if you’re wondering how a bit of flour and water and some pictures torn out of magazines could possibly clock up a £5,000 price tag, you are out of touch.

“Scrapbooking” or “scrapping” has come a long way from being the pastime of teenage girls wanting to document their latest celebrity crush — consumers around the world spend around $3 billion a year. In the States, the craze is huge; it is estimated that one American in four is at it.

The hobby may have been invented over here by the Victorians, but a housewife from Montana claims to have kick-started its new-found popularity in 1987. Armed with little more than a passion for arranging her family photos — and, perhaps, inspiration from Utah, where Mormon traditional interest in ancestry has helped Salt Lake City to become the world’s unofficial scrapbooking capital — Rhonda Anderson struck a deal with a photo album manufacturer. And Creative Memories was born.

The company, dedicated to helping people document family history creatively, took its inspiration from the Tupperware party approach to selling. Creative Memories now has more than 90,000 representatives, spanning all of the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Germany, Japan and Taiwan. In 2003, K&Company, a rival, was listed among America’s 500 fastest growing businesses.

There are countless clubs, magazines and websites devoted to it. Type “scrapbooking” into Google and you get 1,820,000 search results.

Events (including, intriguingly, scrapbooking retreats and cruises); specialist craft emporiums selling dozens of products from albums to stickers to paper and glue (lignin and acid-free respectively — preservation is a key selling point) and “embellishments” (a mind-boggling array of decorative scrapbook accessories); specialist machinery, computer software and tool kits, each with hundreds of constantly updated ranges. There’s a National Scrapbooking Day in May — and the craze even has its own language.

And on this side of the Atlantic, we’re catching up. Back in the commuter belt, near Longfield in Kent, it’s a Sunday morning and around 15 women, aged between 26 and 63, are gathered for a fortnightly “crop” (scrapbook-making session), organised by Sarah Mason and her friend Karen McIvoy. Together they run a three-year-old website, www.scrapaholics.co.uk, as well as overseeing 35 satellite cropping clubs.

The website represents just a fraction of the UK’s new-found passion for the craze. Another site, Ukscrappers.com, which also has a members’ forum, has seen its numbers double from 4,000 to 8,000 in the last 12 months.

“It’s quite extraordinary,” says Ben Lane, of Quarto Publishing, the company behind Creative Scrapbooking magazine, which launched in this country in November. At the time, it was up against just one other newsstand title devoted to the hobby. There are now four, with IPC, the publishing heavyweights, rumoured to have a fifth in the pipeline.

Lane’s magazine launched after one of his company’s long-standing art titles began to flag. “It really hit home when a little art supply shop down in Cornwall that had advertised with us for more than ten years suddenly stopped,” he says. “They told us, ‘no one wants to buy paint anymore; all they want is papercraft stuff’. Painting tends to be an older person’s hobby — you retire and you either play golf, help out at the local church, lie about in the sun or you paint. Essentially, all our readers were dying. We thought, ‘Oh my God, this is a disaster’.” But scrapbooking saved them.

“Bring a sense of humour and prepare to be sucked into the addictive world of scrapbooking!” McIvoy had advised in her e-mail invitation. I’m dubious — the closest I ever got to making a scrapbook was a “secrets box” inspired by a Judy Blume novel and decorated with photos of Wham! and ponies. I was about 12. What could possibly possess sensible adults to be so obsessed?