Abstract
This chapter introduces the book as a history of how outdoor advertising was positioned, challenged and regulated principally as a physical and experiential phenomenon. It argues that the few histories of advertising in existence have failed to examine the causes and meanings of the disagreements over the place of outdoor advertising in modern Britain. It is concerned with the development and application of primarily legislative and governmental approaches to controlling commercial signage, billboards, posters and hoardings of various types in both the countryside and urban areas and their development between the early-nineteenth century and the beginning of the 1960s. As such, what follows can be read in basic form as a narrative of the campaigns, bills and byelaws that radically curtailed the proliferation of outdoor advertising over a century and a half, but is also a means to examine the character of governmental approaches to the regulation of urban and rural spaces and the meanings attached to them.
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Notes
- 1.
This is common to many histories of advertising, for example, see: Clarence Moran, The Business of Advertising (Abingdon, 1905), pp. 20–24; Cyril Sheldon, A History of Poster Advertising (London, 1937), p. 1. In the rather more neutral Blanche B. Elliott, The History of English Advertising (London, 1962), she suggests that whilst playbills might reasonably date to the thirteenth century the poster craze was a phenomenon of the early nineteenth century.
- 2.
David Bernstein, Advertising Outdoors: Watch This Space! (London, 1997), pp. 14–25.
- 3.
Jacob Larwood and John Camden Hotten, The History of Signboards, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London, 1908 [1866]), pp. 1–3.
- 4.
Moran, The Business of Advertising, p. 98; Sheldon, A History of Poster Advertising, p. 1.
- 5.
Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford, 1990), p. 1.
- 6.
Richardson Evans, The Age of Disfigurement (London, 1893), p. 1. Evans was the driving force behind the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising (SCAPA), who emerged in the late nineteenth century as the primary opponents of outdoor advertising. Their origins and activities are dealt with in Chapters 3 and 4.
- 7.
The Times, 18 November 1892, p. 10.
- 8.
James Taylor, ‘Written in the Skies: Advertising, Technology and Modernity in Britain Since 1885’, Journal of British Studies 55:4 (2016), pp. 750–780; Paul Readman ‘Landscape Preservation, “Advertising Disfigurement”, and English National Identity c.1890–1914’, Rural History 12:1 (2001), pp. 61–83.
- 9.
Bernstein, Advertising Outdoors, p. 12; W. Hamish Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850–1914 (London, 1981); Ernest Turner, The Shocking History of Advertising (London, 1965), p. 242.
- 10.
Stefan Schutt, Sam Roberts and Leanne White (eds), Advertising and Public Memory: Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives and Ghost Signs (Abingdon, 2017).
- 11.
Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture (New York, 1976); Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2003), chapter 7; Sean Nixon, Hard Sell: Advertising, Affluence and Transatlantic Relations, c.1951–69 (Manchester, 2013); Clemens Wischermann and Elliott Shore (eds), Advertising and the European City: Historical Perspectives (Aldershot, 2000).
- 12.
Nixon, Hard Sell, p. 182.
- 13.
Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, pp. 134–146; Frank Mort, ‘The Commercial Domain: Advertising and the Cultural Management of Demand’, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London, 1999), pp. 55–75.
- 14.
For example: Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of the Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, 1982), p. 141.
- 15.
Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, introduction. For critics see: Christopher A. Kent’s review in Victorian Periodicals Review 25:3 (1992), pp. 145–147 and John K. Walton, ‘Towns and Consumerism’, in Martin Daunton (ed), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. 3 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 715–744 (pp. 723 and 735).
- 16.
Aaron J. Segal, ‘Commercial Immanence: The Poster and Urban Territory in Nineteenth-Century France’, in Wischermann and Shore (eds), Advertising and the European City, pp. 113–138 (pp. 129–132).
- 17.
Laura Baker, ‘Public Sites Versus Public Sights: The Progressive Response to Outdoor Advertising and the Commercialization of Public Space’, American Quarterly 59:4 (2007), pp. 1187–1213; Kurt Iveson, ‘Branded Cities: Outdoor Advertising, Urban Governance, and the Outdoor Media Landscape’, Antipode 44:1 (2012), pp. 151–174. Also: John W. Houck (ed), Outdoor Advertising: History and Regulation (London, 1969); Charles R. Taylor and Weih Chang, ‘The History of Outdoor Advertising Regulation in the United States’, Journal of Macromarketing 15:1 (1995), pp. 47–59.
- 18.
For example: Charlotte Wildman, Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–39 (London, 2016), pp. 92–98.
- 19.
Anne M. Cronin, Advertising Myths: The Strange Half-Lives and Images of Commodities (London, 2004), pp. 34–35; Turner, The Shocking History of Advertising. The exceptions to the prevailing narrative are two books by former advertising industry professionals Terry Nevett, Advertising in Britain: A History (London, 1982)—a book produced on behalf of the advertising industry’s own History of Advertising Trust—and Cyril Sheldon, A History of Poster Advertising (London, 1937) who both lean quite heavily on the—in reality sometimes rather reluctant—adoption of self-policing by the advertising contractors as the main driver of change.
- 20.
Taylor, ‘Written in the Skies’.
- 21.
Readman ‘Landscape Preservation, “Advertising Disfigurement”’.
- 22.
Paul Slack, The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2015), p. 1; Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1783–1867 (London, 2014).
- 23.
Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon (London, 2000).
- 24.
James Chandler, Explaining Local Government: Local Government in Britain Since 1800 (Manchester, 2007); Barry Doyle, ‘The Changing Functions of Urban Government: Councillors, Officials and Pressure Groups’, in Martin Daunton (ed), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. 3 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 287–314.
- 25.
Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003).
- 26.
Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (London, 2010), p. 14.
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Greenhalgh, J. (2021). Introduction. In: Injurious Vistas: The Control of Outdoor Advertising, Governance and the Shaping of Urban Experience in Britain, 1817–1962. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79018-9_1
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