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Leisure, luxury and urban specialization in the eighteenth century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2008

JON STOBART  and
LEONARD SCHWARZ
JON STOBART
Affiliation:
School of Social Sciences, University of Northampton, Boughton Green Road, Northampton, NN2 7AL
LEONARD SCHWARZ
Affiliation:
School of Historical Studies, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT
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Abstract

This article forms a contribution to the ongoing debate about the nature of an English urban renaissance. We draw on Schwarz's designation of residential leisure towns to explore the spread of leisure and luxury through a broad range of towns. Our analysis reveals that leisure facilities and luxury service and retail provision were widespread, but that residential leisure towns appear as qualitatively different places, the status of which was contingent upon social profile and cultural-economy, rather than demographic, political or socio-economic make up. We conclude by arguing that urban typologies based on specialization should be tempered with older-established and more subjective categorizations based on the status of the town.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , August 2008 , pp. 216 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

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28 Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, 183–5; Stobart, Hann and Morgan, Spaces of Consumption, 26–56.

29 This exercise took population into account. Facilities per thousand of population were averaged for the two groups and compared. The t-test is a parametric test used to determine the significance of the difference between two groups of data measured on an interval scale.

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52 Those that remain in the top 20 are Liverpool (which has the highest luxury service score, but falls to twentieth when population is taken into account), Bristol (which goes from third to eighteenth) and Newcastle (which falls from sixth to fourteenth). Of the others, Manchester falls from second to thirty-first, and Birmingham from fifth to fifty-second.

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67 Taken from Schwarz, ‘Residential leisure towns’, 56–7.