¹ For a comparative view on European city markets, see Guàrdia, M. and Oyón, J.L. (eds.), Hacer ciudad a través de los mercados. Europa, siglos XIX–XX (Barcelona 2010)Google Scholar (English translation: Making Cities through Market Halls. Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (Barcelona 2015)).

² García Domènech, R. M., ‘Mercats de Barcelona a la primera meitat del segle XIX’, Història Urbana de Barcelona, Actes del II Congrés d'Història del Pla de Barcelona, 6–7 (1985), vol. II (Barcelona, 1990), 191–207Google Scholar.

³ As late as December 1848, the Sant Josep market hall was signing an agreement with the owners of the Vicereine's Palace to arrange the fish-shop area. At the Santa Caterina market hall, the works did not begin until 1847. Archivo Municipal Contemporáneo de Barcelona, Patrimoni Artístic i Ambiental, ‘Enderrocament antiga peixateria del mercat de la Boqueria, 1835’, box 46.147/7.50.

⁴ Lemoine, B., Les halles de Paris. L'histoire d'un lieu, les péripéties d'une reconstruction, la succession des projets, l'architecture des monuments, l'enjeu d'une ‘cité’ (Paris, 1980), 32Google Scholar; García Domènech, ‘Mercats de Barcelona’.

⁵ G. Teyssot, ‘Habits/Habitus/Habitat’ (1996), http://urban.cccb.org: ‘In Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, Walter Benjamin has noted how iron and glass were avoided in dwellings while such materials came to be used in shopping lanes, covered markets, pavilions for expositions and railway stations: “buildings which served transitory purposes”. Two contrasting modes of subjectivity begin to insinuate themselves into the world of things: on the one hand, the “transitoriness” that determines a sort of man, mobile and nomadic; on the other, the old individualism of the inhabitant par excellence who defends his traditional “permanence” or “allocation”. . .It is certainly true that recent studies, for example on the Victorian country house in Great Britain or on the apartment building during the Haussmann era, tend to qualify Benjamin's assertion that “iron, then, combines itself immediately with functional moments of economic life”.’

⁶ Guàrdia, M. and Oyón, J.L., ‘La formació del modern sistema de mercats de Barcelona (1874–1921)’, Quaderns del Seminari d'Història de Barcelona, 20 (Barcelona, 2008), 7–57Google Scholar; Fava, N., Guàrdia, M. and Oyón, J.L., ‘Public versus private: Barcelona's market system, 1868–1975’, Planning Perspectives, 25 (2010), 5–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. Guàrdia and J.L. Oyón, ‘El sistema de mercados de Barcelona’, in Guàrdia and Oyón (eds.), Hacer ciudad, 263–98.

⁷ Schmiechen, J. and Carls, K., The British Market Hall. An Architectural and Social History (New Haven and London, 1999), 95Google Scholar, 101, 185–7; Tangires, H., Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, 2003)Google Scholar. For a recent assessment of the urban impact of the European markets, see M. Guàrdia and J.L. Oyón, ‘Los mercados europeos como creadores de ciudad’, in Guàrdia and Oyón (eds.), Hacer ciudad, 11–71.

⁸ Rovira y Rabassa, A., El hierro. Sus cortes y enlaces, 2 vols. (Barcelona, c. 1900)Google Scholar; word ‘Mercado’, Enciclopedia Espasa, vol. XXXIV (Madrid and Barcelona, c. 1920–30); the Italian market manuals in the inter-war period also repeat these criteria: ‘In the big cities a single market hall does not suffice but rather such a number is required that the inhabitants of an area need not travel over 600 to 800 metres along the street to go from their home to the market. There should be one market hall for every 20,000–30,000 inhabitants’ (D. Donghi, ‘I mercati coperti’, in Manual dell´Architetto (Turin, 1925), p. 262); also see Basile, F., I Mercati (Messina, 1940)Google Scholar.

⁹ Phillips, M., ‘The evolution of markets and shops in Britain’, in Benson, J. and Shaw, G. (eds.), The Evolution of Retail Systems, c. 1800–1914 (Leicester, 1992), 53–75Google Scholar; D. Denecke and G. Shaw, ‘Traditional retail systems in Germany’, in ibid., 76–86; J. Benson, ‘Small-scale retailing in Canada’, in ibid., 87–100; Tangires, Public Markets, 201–5.

¹⁰ Scola, R., ‘Food markets and shops in Manchester, 1770–1870’, Journal of Historical Geography, 1 (1975), 153–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scola, R., Feeding the Victorian City: The Food Supply of Manchester, 1770–1870 (Manchester, 1992)Google Scholar; Schmiechen and Carls, British Market Halls, 128; Hodson, D., ‘The municipal store: adaptation and development in the retail markets of nineteenth-century urban Lancashire’, in Alexander, N. and Akehurst, G. (eds.), The Emergence of Modern Retailing, 1750–1950 (London, 1999), 94–114Google Scholar.

¹¹ It should also be noted that other commercial forms, such as those of the consumer co-operatives, played a role of substantial importance in Great Britain from the end of the nineteenth century. See M. Purvis, ‘Co-operative retailing in Britain’, in Benson and Shaw (eds.), The Evolution of Retail Systems, 107–34.

¹² A. Siegel, ‘Budapest: alimentación, ciudad y evolución de los mercados cubiertos’, in Guardia and Oyón (eds.), Hacer ciudad, 365–404.

¹³ Bluestone, D.M., ‘The pushcart evil. Peddlers, merchants, and New York city streets, 1890–1940’, Journal of Urban History, 18 (1991), 68–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The estimates of some distributors attributed a share of between 25% and 40% to street vending in the 1920s (ibid., 86). See also Green, D.R., ‘Street trading in London: a case study of casual labour, 1830–1860’, in Johnson, J.H. and Pooley, C.G. (eds.), The Structure of Nineteenth-Century Cities (London, Canberra and New York, 1982), 129Google Scholar–51; Denecke and Shaw, ‘Traditional retail systems’; Beall, K.F., Kaufrufe und Strassenhändler. Eine Bibliographie (Hamnut, 1975)Google Scholar; Ealham, C., ‘La lluita pel carrer. Els venedors ambulants durant la II República’, L'Avenç, 230 (1998), 21Google Scholar–6; Ealham, C., Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898–1937 (Oxford and New York, 2005)Google Scholar; Nieto Sánchez, J.A., Historia del Rastro, vol. II (Madrid, 2007), 46–51Google Scholar, 171–93; Ranke, W., Heinrich Zille photographien Berlin, 1890–1910 (Munich, 1975), 121Google Scholar–7. For comparison with other contexts, see Bromley, R., ‘Working in the streets: survival strategy, necessity or unavoidable evil?', in Gibert, A., Hardoy, J.E. and Ramírez, R. (eds.), Urbanization in Contemporary Latin America (Chichester, 1982), 59–77Google Scholar; Benson, J., ‘Hawking and peddling in Canada, 1867–1914’, Social History, 18 (1985), 75–83Google Scholar; Brown-May, A., ‘A charitable indulgence: street stalls and the transformation of public space in Melbourne’, Urban History, 23 (1996), 48–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porter, S.S., ´And that it is custom makes it law. Class conflict and gender ideology in the public sphere – Mexico City, 1880–1910’, Social Science History, 24 (2000), 111Google Scholar–48.

¹⁴ A useful summary of British and North American studies on this subject may be found in Dennis, R., Cities in Modernity. Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar, ch. 6.

¹⁵ M. Miller, ‘Las reinas de los mercados: cultura municipal y género en el sector del comercio minorista alimentario de Barcelona’, in Guardia and Oyón (eds.), Making Cities, 299–328. See also Miller, M., Feeding Barcelona, 1714–1975: Public Market Halls, Social Networks, and Consumer Culture (Baton Rouge, 2015)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Addresses of men and women stall holders have been mapped from Libro Registro Mercado del Born, Institut Municipal de Mercats de Barcelona (IMMB) Archive.

¹⁷ For a comparison with journey-to-work patterns of the inter-war working-class world, see Oyón, J.L., La quiebra de la ciudad popular. Espacio urbano, inmigración y anarquismo en la Barcelona de entreguerras, 1914–1936 (Barcelona, 2008)Google Scholar, ch. 5; Oyón, J. L., ‘The split of a working-class city: urban space, immigration and anarchism in inter-war Barcelona, 1914–1936’, Urban History, 36 (2009), 86–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ Municipal Barcelona Contemporary Archive, Padrón de habitantes, 1945; Mercado Central de Frutas y Verduras, Indicador (Barcelona, 1948)Google ScholarPubMed.

¹⁹ Miller, ‘Las reinas del mercado’, 321. These establishments outside the market hall mostly had male proprietors. In 1932, the shops that showed the largest proportion of female proprietors were: egg shops, 55%; salted fish shops, 35%; small game shops, 33%; grocery shops, 26%; low tax-rate food shops, 24%, and children's clothing shops, 22%, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón (ACA), Matrícula Industrial, 1932 (Industrial and Commercial Tax Register).

²⁰ For recent food retailing mapping around municipal markets, see Pla especial d'equipament comercial alimentari de la ciutat de Barcelona (PECAB) (Barcelona, 1990); Carreras, C. (ed.), Atlas comercial de Barcelona (Barcelona, 2003)Google Scholar.

²¹ Oyón, La quiebra, 329.

²² Schmiechen and Carls, British Market Halls¸ 166–75; Davies, A., ‘Saturday night markets in Manchester and Salford, 1840–1939’, Manchester Region History Review, 1 (1987), 3–12Google Scholar.

²³ Guàrdia and Oyón, ‘La formació’, 24–8.

²⁴ For the social characterization of the Barcelona neighbourhoods in the inter-war period, see Oyón, La Quiebra; Oyón, ‘The split of a working-class city’.

²⁵ J. Benson and G. Shaw, ‘Conclusion’, in The Evolution of Retail Systems, 200; Baics, G., ‘Is access to food a public good? Meat provisioning in early New York City, 1790–1820´, Journal of Urban History, 25 (2012), 1–26Google Scholar; Baics, G., ‘Time and space: structures of urban household provisioning’, 11th International Conference on Urban History (Prague 29 Aug. – Sep. 2012)Google Scholar. To be more precise, Barcelona's picture would be similar to that of the end of the period studied by Baics with a century time span difference.

²⁶ Shaw, G., ‘Recent research on the commercial structure of nineteenth-century British cities’, in Denecke, D. and Shaw, G. (eds.), Urban Historical Geography. Recent Progress in Britain and Germany (Cambridge, 1988), 236Google Scholar–42.

²⁷ Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict, and Ealham, ‘La lluita pel carrer’. The photographs by Margaret Michaelis and Gabriel Casas are magnificent witnesses to the street commerce in the Raval district.

²⁸ Administrative Municipal Archives of Barcelona, Municipal Acts-Plenary, 26 Jul. 1955, fol. 120v, and Municipal Acts-Plenary, 28 Apr. 1956, fol. 54: ‘We currently have 24 market halls. . .and in relation to Barcelona's one and a half million inhabitants they are insufficient to attend to the population since the proportion is of less than one market per 50,000 inhabitants, whereas a healthy supply policy advises the allotting of a maximum of 20,000 inhabitants to each market. For diverse circumstances. . .the supply system in our city cannot be compared to other systems of large European and American cities. For this reason, considering the difficulties which would be entailed by the construction of the large number of market halls required by the public, this insufficiency should be solved by means of private markets, that is to say, by providing access and channels to private initiative as an element of collaboration in the municipal activity.’

²⁹ Administrative Municipal Archives of Barcelona, Municipal Acts-Plenary, 2 Feb. 1967, fol. 156.

³⁰ Administrative Municipal Archives of Barcelona, Municipal Acts-Plenary, 4 Aug. 1966, fol. 79 et seq.

³¹ Tarragó, M., ‘An axis of the “Barcelona model”’, Barcelona Metròpolis, 86 (2012), 59Google Scholar.