Abstract
What exactly is a shop? Historians studying the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century retailing seem to have no difficulty in defining their key subject. For them a shop is a ‘fixed’ shop, generally understood to mean a shop constructed within the body of a building on street level, street facing, with door and shop window on one side and three solid, usually stone or brick, walls on the others. The numerical dominance of these fixed shops in the modern age has resulted in the idea that they present the model of ‘effective’ and ‘modern’ retailing. The success of the fixed shop has, deriving from its formal definition, been attributed to the elements seen to be missing from the market stall — four solid walls, a counter, a glazed shop window, display fittings and other practical and structural trappings involved in promotion and seduction.1 This is not to say that display, seduction, glazing and controlled selling space have not been regarded as vitally important to eighteenth-century retailers, but for most historians these did not function as primary determinants of long-term change. In this chapter I would like to challenge this view. The reasons that fixed shops came to dominate the English urban landscape of consumption by the late nineteenth century are, in my view, rooted not in formal factors of scale, glazing, permanence and related seductive selling, but in factors such as population, economy, civic regulation, urban rationalisation and the need to express cultural values such as reputation and security.
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Notes
See, for example, N. Pevsner, A History of Building Types (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), especially pp. 257–8. McKendrick’s work in particular has encouraged historians of the eighteenth century to search for these elements in eighteenth-century retailing;
see N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa, 1982).
Coquery’s examination of the development of retailing in early modern France criticises the frequent acceptance of the term ‘shop’ without much consideration of the plural meanings of the word. The term, ‘far from signifying a single and immutable reality, is multiform’; N. Coquery (ed.), La Boutique et la Ville (Tours: Université François Rabelais, 2000), p. 8. For examples of the use of ‘common’ shop see Ordinances of the Aldermen of Cheapside, Corporation of London Record Office, Letter Book Y, f.251. ‘Common’ shop may have referred to a shop on street level as opposed to a ‘private’ shop on upper floors. The term ‘open’ shop is frequently used, referring to a street-fronting shop rather than one that was unglazed.
British Museum Add. MSS 33,039, fols 161–2b: HM Customs Library, E/T, 5:14. See N. Cox, The Complete Tradesman: A Study of Retailing, 1550–1820 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 34–5
and L. Mui and H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth Century England (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), p. 34. A tax was proposed initially on shop signs, and then on ‘all open shops and retailers’.
See V. Harding, ‘Shops, Markets and Retailers in London’s Cheapside, c. 1500–1700’, in B. Blondé et al. (eds), Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), p. 166.
For example, the purchase of pistols from a ‘stall’, Old Bailey Proceedings: David Morgan, William Dupuy, theft with violence: highway robbery, 6 May 1761 OBP t17610506–15, and the sale of fashionable items from annual fairs, K. Morrison, English Shops and Shopping (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 18.
B. Trinder, Blackwell Encyclopedia of Industrial Archaeology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 302
H. Louw, ‘Window-glass Making in Britain c. 1660–c.1860 and Its Architectural Impact’, Construction History, 7 (1991), 47–68
H. Louw, ‘The Rise of the Metal Window during the Early Industrial Period in Britain c. 1750–1830’, Construction History, 3 (1987), 31–54. The earlier casement windows used in domestic housing were not suitable for shop glazing.
C. Walsh, ‘Shop Design and the Display of Goods in the Eighteenth Century’ (unpublished MA dissertation: V&A/Royal College of Art, 1993).
Quoted in D. Keene, ‘Sites of Desire: Shops, Selds and Wardrobes in London and Other English Cities, 1100–1550’, in B. Blondé et al. (eds), Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), p. 136.
On antiquity see M. Beard, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (London: Profile Books, 2008), chapter 2.
See for example, T. Platter, Thomas Platter’s Travels in England, ed. C. Williams (London, 1937; lst edn 1599), p. 157;
S. Von La Roche, Sophie in London, trans. C. William (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933; 1st edn 1784), p. 87.
E. W. Moore, The Fairs of Medieval England: An Introductory Study (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1985), p. 146.
R. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 162–3.
D. Keene, ‘Shops and Shopping in Medieval London’, in L. Grant (ed.), Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in London: British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions for the year 1984 Vol. X (London: British Archaeological Association, 1990), pp. 29–46; selds were not regulated at all inside.
See Cox, The Complete Tradesman, pp. 31–6 on retail regulation; see B. Lemire, ‘Plebeian Commercial Circuits and Everyday Material Exchange in England, c. 1600–1900’, in B. Blondé et al. (eds), Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), p. 247 for the regulation of ambulatory retailers.
P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 18–19 and 90–5.
S. Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. C. Latham and W. Mathews (London: Bell & Hyman, 1983), vol. IV, 191,22 June 1663.
Goldsmiths’ shops on Goldsmiths’ Row were described in 1603 in J. Stow, A Survey of London Written in the Year1598, as ‘beautified towards the street with the Goldsmith’s arms and the likeness of woodmen, … riding on monstrous beasts, all which is cast in lead, richly painted over and gilt …’. Quoted in R. Luff, ‘The City’s Ancient Shopping Centres’, Chartered Surveyor, 112 (1980), 413.
C. Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets: the Marchands Merciers of Eighteenth-Century Paris (London, Victoria & Albert Museum, 1996).
C. Walsh, ‘The Advertising and Marketing of Consumer Goods in Eighteenth-Century London’, in C. Wischermann and E. Shore (eds), Advertising and the European City: Historical Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 79–95.
D. Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (1727) (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970) p. 209.
Rouquet in 1755, quoted in B. Denvir, The Eighteenth Century: Art, Design and Society 1689–1789 (London and New York: Longman, 1988), p. 44.
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As urban historian Bernard Lepetit remarked, ‘the city is a place of contrasts and of the arrangement of people and things according to their value’; B. Lepetit, ‘La ville moderne en France. Essai d’histoire immédiate’, in J.-L. Biget and J.-C. Hervé (eds), Panoramas urbains: Situation de l’histoire des villes (Fontenay-aux-Roses: ENS Éditions, 1995), p. 197.
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J. Stobart, ‘“A Settled Little Society of Trading People”? The Eighteenth-Century Retail Community of an English County Town’, in B. Blondé et al. (eds), Retailers and Consumer Changes in Early Modem Europe: England, France, Italy and the Low Countries (Tours: Presses universitaires de Tours, 2005), pp. 189–212; Garrioch, Neighbourhood and Community, pp. 96–148.
B. Rouleau, Le Tracé des rues de Paris: Formation, typologie, fonctions (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1975; 1st edn 1967);
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R. Monnier, Le Faubourg Saint-Antoine (1789–1815) (Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes, 1981), pp. 19–20, 35–47 and the map, p. 40;
H. Burstin, Le Faubourg Saint-Marcel à l’époque révolutionnaire: Structure économique et composition sociale (Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes, 1983).
The relationship between luxury trades and the wealth of the people living in the area also holds today and is evident in M. Pinçon and M. Pinçon-Charlot, Dans les beaux quartiers (Paris: Le Seuil, 1989).
See L.-S. Mercier and N. E. Restif de La Bretonne, Paris le jour, Paris la nuit (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1990), p. 187; ‘Quartier de la Cité’, p. 108.
J. Favier, ‘Une ville entre deux vocations: la place d’affaires de Paris au XVe siècle’, Annales ESC, 5 (1973), 1253
J.-P. Babelon, Nouvelle histoire de Paris: Paris au XVI e siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1986), p. 148
Y. Carbonnier, ‘Le cœur de Paris à la veille de la Révolution. Étude de géographie sociale’, Histoire Urbaine, 6 (2002), 60. 24.
I. Backouche, La trace du fleuve: La Seine et Paris (1750–1850) (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2000), p. 54.
H. Ballon, ‘La place Dauphine: Urbanisme et développement’, in J.-C. Garreta (ed.), L’île de la Cité (Paris: Délégation artistique de la ville de Paris, 1987), pp. 28–30.
M. Bimbenet-Privat, Les orfevres et l’orfevrerie de Paris au XVII e siécle (Paris: Commission des travaux historiques de la ville de Paris, 2002).
See, in this book, the chapter by Claire Walsh, and her previous studies on shop design: C. Walsh, ‘Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Design History, 8 (1995), 157–76
C. Walsh, ‘The Design of London Goldsmiths’ Shops in the Early Eighteenth Century’, in D. Mitchell (ed.), Goldsmiths, Silversmiths and Bankers: Innovation and Transfer of Skills, 1550–1750 (London: Centre for Metropolitan History, 1995), pp. 96–111
C. Walsh, ‘Shopping et tourisme: l’attrait des boutiques parisiennes au XVIIIe siècle’, in N. Coquery (ed.), La boutique et la ville: Commerces, commerçants, espaces et clientèles XVI e –XX e siécle. Actes du colloque de l’université de Tours, 2, 3 et 4 décembre 1999 (Tours: Publication de l’université François Rabelais, 2000), pp. 139–45.
C. Walsh, ‘Shopping in Early-Modern London, c.1660–1800’ (unpublished PhD thesis, European University Institute Florence, 2001)
L. Turcot, Le promeneur a Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 2007)
C. Loir and L. Turcot (eds), La promenade au tournant des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Belgique-France-Angleterre) (Brussels: Éditions de l’université de Bruxelles, collection des Études sur le XVIIIe siècle, 2011)
N. Coquery, ‘Promenade et shopping: la visibilité nouvelle de l’échange économique dans le Paris du XVIIIe siècle’, in Loir and Turcot (eds), La promenade au tournant des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Brussels: Éditions de l’université de Bruxelles, collection des Études sur le XVIIIe siècle, 2011), pp. 61–75.
C. Zalc, Melting Shops: Une histoire des commerçants étrangers en France (Paris: Perrin, 2010)
C. Zalc, ‘Les territoires urbains des petits entrepreneurs étrangers à Belleville entre les deux guerres’, in N. Coquery (ed.), La boutique et la ville: Commerces, commerçants, espaces et clientèles XVI e –XX e siècle (Tours: Publication de l’université Francois Rabelais, 2000), pp. 403–21.
A. Gasnier, ‘Espaces marchands, société et urbanité’, in N. Coquery (ed.), La boutique et la ville: Commerces, commerçants, espaces et clientèles XVI e –XX e siècle (Tours: Publication de l’université Francois Rabelais, 2000), pp. 447–60.
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Walsh, C. (2014). Stalls, Bulks, Shops and Long-Term Change in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England. In: Furnée, J.H., Lesger, C. (eds) The Landscape of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314062_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314062_3
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