Jon Stobart

Retailing Revolution in the Eighteenth Century? Evidence from North-West England

This article explores the extent and nature of retail change in the eighteenth century. In focusing on a single region, it places retailing in its spatial, economic and social context; by adopting different scales of analysis – shop, town and region – it reveals much about the spatiality of retailing. The study shows that retail change had penetrated all aspects of retailing and all parts of the regional urban hierarchy by the end of the eighteenth century. However, any retailing revolution was a patchy and conditional process: the pace of change varied, and the gap between large and small towns apparently widened in the early nineteenth century.

Tourism and Local Economic Development

The relationships between tourism and local economic development extend beyond conventional notions of jobs, diversification and income. The drive for tourism by local authorities and linked agencies, often through the creation of a local action plan, provides a valuable self-appraisal opportunity that may raise the awareness of local economic potentials. Moreover, it also nurtures productive team-building and partnership development within and between local authorities and outside agencies and organisations, and spins off into wider local economic benefits such as image enhancement and the attraction of inward investment. Ultimately, it may boost the local policy machine in ways that enhance and extend the status and strength of the local economy.

Shopping streets as social space: leisure, consumerism and improvement in an eighteenth-century county town

The eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of ‘leisure towns’ as the chief resorts of wealthy consumers of a new range of goods and services. Their prosperity related closely to the growth of consumerism, but little attention has been given to the ways in which shopping and shops linked into the changing social, economic and physical structure of such towns. This paper explores these processes in the context of Chester – a classic, but largely neglected leisure town – and concludes that shopping streets became central to the economy of the city and amongst the most important of its social spaces.

Personal and commercial networks in an English port: Chester in the early eighteenth century

Abstract Family and community have long been seen as key social structures, but economic historians increasingly recognise their importance in to the structure and success of business in the early-modern period. New institutional perspectives view such networks as central to business integration, not least because of the relationships of trust and information exchange that they comprise. This paper attempts to reconstruct the broad parameters of the social webs that drew together towns in north-west England in the early 18th century. These form the socio-spatial context in which to place detailed analysis of the social and business networks of Chesters merchant community. Family was central to the social lives of these men and framed their strategies of wealth distribution, but it was the local, civic and wider merchant community that structured their economic worlds of wealth creation. The last of these was the most important, providing the dispersed web of trusted links essential to successful long-distance trade. The exchange of information within these networks helped to reduce transaction costs and served to cement the relationships of trust between merchants. But networks did not happen automatically or accidentally: they were contingent on interaction and communication, making these business links intensely personal and further blurring the distinction between social and economic spheres.

Sites of Consumption: The Display of Goods in Provincial Shops in Eighteenth-Century England

Recent analyses have thrown open the shutters on supposedly dark and unappealing eighteenth-century shops and revealed them as complex social and economic spaces. This paper builds on such work to explore the ways in which the display of goods in provincial shops served a range of symbolic and practical functions. Drawing on detailed analysis of probate inventories, we argue that shopfittings were employed to assist in the process of selling wares by making them more visible to the customer. Displaying goods allowed shopkeepers to project appropriate images of their business as prosperous and themselves as knowledgeable. At the same time, the shop was shaped by and around the spatial practices of consumers as they browsed, selected and purchased goods. What is most striking, perhaps, is that these developments characterized shops from Kent to Lancashire, and from fashionable county towns to rural villages. Shops everywhere were becoming sites of consumption.

Building an urban identity. Cultural space and civic boosterism in a 'new' industrial town: Burslem, 1761-1911

In 1761 the residents of Burslem in the Staffordshire Potteries built a town hall. It was the first civic building in a rapidly growing industrial settlement and is frequently seen as marking the birth of Burslem as a town. One hundred and fifty years later the borough council spent over £35,000 on a new town hall – a last defiant act before Burslem was amalgamated with five neighbouring towns in the new county borough of Stoke-on-Trent. These two projects form the opening and closing chapters in a narrative of civic enterprise in Burslem. They also serve to define the discourse of urban identity in the town: a discourse which, as we shall see, was shaped by external/spatial relationships – rivalries with neighbouring places – as well as internal/social processes. Identity as and of a town has multiple layers. For many places, it was linked to the possession and nature of a charter along with the associated coat of arms and civic trappings, including municipal records. These might be augmented by a tradition of town histories, celebrating the glories of the past, highlighting recent development or calling for greater activity in future. Many of the manufacturing towns of the Midlands and North gained such formal accoutrements only in the midor late nineteenth century, often after decades if not centuries of functioning and being generally acknowledged as towns. In these places especially, civic culture – the construction of town halls, museums, libraries, concert halls and the like – was central to identity and image, both of the town and its elite. In all towns, such investment vastly increased in scale and importance with the expansion of the powers, responsibilities, roles and, of course, the budgets of municipal government in the second half of the nineteenth century. It also changed in nature. The eighteenth-century emphasis on polite

A history of shopping: the missing link between retail and consumer revolutions

Purpose – This paper aims to reconsider and reframe the relationship between retail and consumer revolutions, arguing that the two have too often been separated empirically and conceptually.Design/methodology/approach – Reviewing a broad range of literature, the paper discussed the ways in which the historiography of retailing and consumption might be brought together by a greater focus on and theorisation of shopping.Findings – The paper highlights equivocation in the literature about the extent to which retailing was transformed during the eighteenth century in response to consumer changes. Whilst some aspects were dramatically transformed, others remained largely unchanged. It draws on a rather smaller body of work to illustrate the ways in which shopping practices were instrumental in connecting shops and consumers, linking the cultural world of consumption to the economic realm of retailing.Originality/value – The key argument is that, if studies of shopping are to be useful in furthering the underst...

Selling (Through) Politeness: Advertising Provincial Shops in Eighteenth-Century England

ABSTRACT Drawing on a survey of newspaper advertisements and trade cards from the Midlands and north-west England, this article examines the ways in which eighteenth-century advertisements helped to spread notions of politeness. It argues that advertisements were structured by and drew upon the conventions, norms and language of politeness to sell goods and promote shops. At the same time they helped to reproduce and communicate these ideas to a wider public. This had both material and conceptual dimensions: advertisements sold ‘polite’ goods and a ‘polite’ lifestyle, but they were also representations of politeness, signifying its ideals to a burgeoning middle class.

Local authorities, tourism and competition

Tourism development has become a popular pursuit for local authorities seeking to generate new economic horizons. This requires the existence of some special attraction or package, something to distinguish an area from the basic diet of potentials that everywhere else can offer, or a strong competitive edge in what might be labelled as conventional markets. Unfortunately, new ways of nurturing tourism activity are increasingly hard to find and the tourism development scene is an increasingly competitive arena. Yet, competition is an unspoken word within the realms of tourism professionals, and a matter that is rarely confronted in any overt way by researcher

Leisure, luxury and urban specialization in the eighteenth century

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.