Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T20:31:35.650Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The streets for the people: London's street markets 1850–1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2015

VICTORIA KELLEY
VICTORIA KELLEY*
Affiliation:
Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, Granary Building, 1 Granary Square, King's Cross, London, N1C 4AA, UK
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article analyses London's street markets in the years between 1850 and 1939. It shows how this was a period of significant growth for street markets, with both steeply increasing numbers of markets and a steady increase in the number of stalls overall. These markets were informal and unauthorized for much of the period under discussion; the administrative/local government context was complex, and competing authorities (the City of London, London County Council, metropolitan boroughs and national government) hesitated in regulating the organic growth of street market trading, while also recognizing the contribution it made to bringing cheap food and commodities to the population of London. It will be argued that the street market, far from being merely the survival of a primitive form of retail, flourished in response to modernity in London. It should be analysed alongside other developing forms of retail, and considered for its contribution to the culture and material culture of the city.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 43 , Special Issue 3: Markets in modernization: transformations in urban market space and practice, c. 1800 - c. 1970 , August 2016 , pp. 391 - 411
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre, box 56, 88/14,868.

2 Kershman, A.R., The London Market Guide (London, 2008)Google Scholar; Harriss, P., The London Markets (London, 2006)Google Scholar.

3 Walkowitz, J., Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (New Haven and London, 2012), 144Google Scholar.

4 Mayhew, H., London Labour and the London Poor, vol. I: London Street Folk (London, 1851), 10Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., 10.

6 Dodd, G., The Food of London (London, 1856)Google Scholar.

7 Sims, G., How the Poor Live (London, 1883)Google Scholar; Sala, G.A., Twice Round the Clock: Or the Hours of the Day and Night in London (London, 1859)Google Scholar.

8 See, for example, Scannell, D., Mother Knew Best: An East-End Childhood (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Mannin, E., Confessions and Impressions (London, 1936; orig. edn 1930)Google Scholar.

9 Report of the Royal Commission on Market Rights and Tolls, 13 vols. (London, 1888–91).

10 London County Council Public Control Department, London Markets: Special Report of the Public Control Committee Relative to Existing Markets and Market Rights (London, 1893); London County Council Public Control Department, Street Markets: Report of the Chief Officer of the Public Control Department as to the Street Markets in the County of London (London, 1901).

11 Booth, C., Life and Labour of the People in London, 17 vols. (London, 1902–03)Google Scholar. See particularly Series 2, ‘Industry’, vol. III.

12 Sullivan, J.W., Markets for the People: The Consumer's Part (New York, 1913)Google Scholar.

13 London School of Economics (LSE), New Survey of London Life and Labour, vol. III: Survey of Social Conditions, ch. XIII: ‘The street trading community’ (London, 1932).

14 Benedetta, M., The Street Markets of London (London, 1936)Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., 71.

16 Report of the Royal Commission, vol. XIII, 2.

17 Ibid., vol. I, 12–22.

18 Joyce, P., The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003)Google Scholar; Stallybrass, P. and White, A., The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London, 1986)Google Scholar. See also Otter, C., ‘Cleansing and clarifying: technology and perception in nineteenth-century London’, Journal of British Studies, 43 (2004), 40–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Dodd, Food of London, 232, 233, 261–4, 346, 370.

20 Booth, Life and Labour, Series 2, ‘Industry’, vol. III, 260.

21 LCC, London Markets, 23–4.

22 Report of the Royal Commission, vol. II, 166–8.

23 LCC, London Markets, 23–6.

24 See for instance Green, D.R. ‘Street trading in London: a case study of casual labour, 1830–60’, in Johnson, J.H. and Pooley, C.G. (eds.), The Structure of Nineteenth-Century Cities (London, 1982), 115–31.Google Scholar

25 Scola, R., ‘Retailing in the nineteenth-century town: some problems and possibilities’, in Johnson, and Pooley, (eds.), Structure of Nineteenth-Century Cities, 154Google Scholar.

26 See for instance Shaw, G. and Wild, M.T., ‘Retail patterns in the Victorian city’, in Benson, J. and Shaw, G. (eds.), The Retailing Industry, vol. II: The Coming of the Mass Market 1800–1945 (London, 1999), 99–100.Google Scholar

27 Bowlby, R., Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; Abelson, E., When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; Nava, M., ‘Modernity's disavowal: women, the city and the department store’, in Nava, M. and O’Shea, A. (eds.), Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London, 1996).Google Scholar

28 Wilson, E., The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991)Google Scholar; Rappaport, E.D., Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton, 2000).Google Scholar

29 Benson, J. and Ugolini, L., A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of British Retailing (London, 2003), 4.Google Scholar

30 Mitchell, I., Tradition and Innovation in English Retailing 1700–1850 (Farnham, 2014), 2–4.Google Scholar

31 Scola, R., Feeding the Victorian City: The Food Supply of Manchester, 1770–1870 (Manchester, 1992)Google Scholar; Blackman, J., ‘The food supply of an industrial town: a study of Sheffield's public markets 1780–1900’, Business History, 5 (1963), 83–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hodson, D., ‘The municipal store: adaptation and development in the retail markets of nineteenth-century urban Lancashire’, Business History, 40 (1998), 94–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 Walkowitz, Nights Out, 144–81; White, J., London in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2008; orig. edn 2007), 197–210 and 129–31Google Scholar; White, J., London in the Twentieth Century (London, 2008; orig. edn 2001), 244–56.Google Scholar

33 Joyce, Rule of Freedom; Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics.

34 Mayhew, London Labour, vol. I, 5–6.

35 Ibid., 3–4.

36 Ibid., 6.

37 Ibid., 9.

38 See also Dodd, Food of London, 515–17.

39 LCC, London Markets, Appendix B.

40 Ibid., Appendix B; Mayhew, London Labour, vol. I, 11.

41 Green, ‘Street trading in London’, 115–31.

42 LSE, New Survey, 312.

43 LCC, Street Markets, 24.

44 Ibid., 63.

45 LSE, New Survey, 312.

46 Ibid., 291–2.

47 Ibid., 290–1.

48 Ibid., 295, 300.

49 LCC, London Markets.

50 Sullivan, Markets for the People, 217.

51 Ibid., 227–8.

52 Mayhew, London Labour, vol. I, 1–4. See also Booth, Life and Labour, Series 1 ‘Poverty’, vol. I, 57–8, and vol. II.

53 Walkowitz, Nights Out, 145.

54 For a short account of Lewisham, see the LSE Charles Booth archive, digitized Police Notebooks. Notebook B374, 74–83, records a walk with PC Lloyds, 14–15 Nov. 1900, in Lewisham. See also the Ideal Homes website (archive and local history collections of the London Boroughs of Bexley, Bromley, Greenwich, Lambeth, Lewisham and Southwark, and the University of Greenwich), www.ideal-homes.org.uk/lewisham/assets/histories/lewisham.

55 Ideal Homes, www.ideal-homes.org.uk/lewisham/assets/galleries/lewisham/stroud-drapers, accessed 2 Feb. 2013.

56 Lewisham Borough Council minute books (LBC minutes) 22 May 1901 refers to a branch of Sainsbury in Lewisham High Street.

57 www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk/1910s-london.html.

58 Roffey, R., The Co-operative Way: The Origins and Progress of the Royal Arsenal and South Suburban Co-operative Societies (Manchester, 1999), 55.Google Scholar

59 LBC minutes, 1901–34.

60 Ibid., vol. 34, no. 15, 4 Jul. 1934, minute 3/10.

61 LCC, London Markets, 26.

62 Stern, W.S., The Baroness's Market: The History of a Noble Failure (London, 1966).Google Scholar

63 LCC, London Markets, 24 and 26.

64 Mayhew, London Labour, vol. I, 9–10.

65 London Metropolitan Archive photographic collection, box SC/PHL/01/251.

66 LBC minutes, see for instance vol. 1, no. 12, 27 Mar. 1901, minute 20; vol. 1, no. 29, 6 Nov. 1901, minutes 3/4 and 3/6; vol. 21, no. 12, 27 Apr. 1921, minute 6/11e; vol. 26, no. 3, 19 Dec. 1925, minute 5/6.

67 LCC, London Markets, 25.

68 W.H. Parker, ‘Just a few tales of the old iron pot’, undated manuscript memoir, Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre, 80–101.

69 Scannell, Mother Knew Best, 39.

70 Sala, Twice Round the Clock, 274.

71 Sims, How the Poor Live, 48.

72 Report of the Royal Commission, vol. II (evidence from costermongers).

73 Benedetta, The Street Markets of London, 175.

74 Mayhew, London Labour (vol. I, 9) mentions ‘the new self-generating gas-lamp’, i.e. naphtha flare; the New Survey (300) mentions ‘the virtual disappearance of the naphtha flare’.

75 Booth, C., reprinted in Keating, P. (ed.), Into Unknown England: Selections from the Social Explorers 1866–1913 (London, 1976), 132.Google Scholar

76 Bosanquet, H., Rich and Poor (London, 1896), 127.Google Scholar

77 Mannin, Confessions and Impressions, 19–20.

78 Scannell, Mother Knew Best, 34–42.

79 Schivelbusch, W., Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford and New York, 1988), 148.Google Scholar

80 Bosanquet, Rich and Poor, 126.

81 Scannell, Mother Knew Best, 34.

82 Bosanquet, Rich and Poor, 126.

83 Sullivan, Markets for the People, 224.