Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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Towns and consumerism
.
P
, the historian of the Co-operative Wholesale Society,
published a series of lectures in on The Consumers’ Place in Society.
This was a tract in praise of consumer democracy and the co-operative
commonwealth, stressing that trade union struggles were necessarily sectionalist
and the only way to advance and protect the interests of the masses was through
the mobilisation of consumers. Redfern began, however, with a lament:
Libraries of books, publications of a special Ministry of Uses, and many journals
would be necessary to deal adequately and continuously with the consumers’
problem of organising the world and its resources for the utmost human use and
enjoyment. These do not exist. Manchester, for some uncomplimentary reason, is
supposed to be the special home of consumers’ advocacy. Yet the Manchester
Reference Library – an admirable institution – contains sufficient volumes under
the title ‘Labour’to fill several crowded pages of its great catalogue; whereas a single
entry under consumption (amidst two-score devoted to the disease) provides for
all the books specifically relating to the consumer.
1
Until a few years ago that could almost have been said of books on the social
history of consumption and consumerism in Britain, as compared with the pro-
liferating historiography of popular politics and the labour movement. Now the
wheel is turning with gathering momentum, as the older heavy industries
decline into extinction and consumer-related topics are fashionable, while
studies of the labour movement are in eclipse. This may be thought a rather
present-minded set of preoccupations, but history has always been written thus,
and earlier neglect of consumption was undoubtedly misplaced. Not that
Redfern, from his almost millenarian and quasi-revolutionary perspective,
would necessarily approve of how this trend has worked out. Much recent work
on leisure and mass consumption has tended to stress the autonomy and agency
1
P. Redfern, The Consumer’s Place in Society (Manchester, ), p. .
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of consumers, their ability to create and diversify identities from the goods and
life styles which are on offer through the cornucopia of the market place.
2
This
approach has emerged in overt or implicit opposition to a historiography ema-
nating from Marx and Engels via Gramsci which has stressed capitalist consu-
merism as a snare and a distraction, a diversion from serious thought and an
offering of baubles to seduce the pliant mind into acquiescence and win assent
to the existing economic order. Such assent need not be unconditional, and
Gramsci’s notion of hegemony entails the idea that attempts to manipulate will
be contested, and that consumers will try to exploit what is available within an
accepted system on their own terms; but this mode of analysis locates the power
and initiative to define commonsense and set priorities firmly in the hands of
the capitalist producers in alliance with retailers and the world of advertising and
publicity.
3
Redfern anticipated neither of these historiographical tendencies: he was
keen that consumers should be satisfied and obtain value for money, and that
their lives should be enhanced by the widening availability of objects of desire,
but his was a vision of moral and intellectual improvement through the fairer
distribution of goods and opportunities, owing much to John Ruskin’s teach-
ings about the responsibility to put nature’s bounty to good, sound, lasting use
in ways which celebrated the creativity of the craft worker.
4
His was no paean
of praise for the imaginative adaptation of whatever mass-produced goods profit
seekers might produce and advertisers boost for mass markets, regardless of the
conditions under which they might be manufactured or the quality and durabil-
ity of the goods themselves.
5
He was no celebrant of the fashionable or the
ephemeral: at the centre of his concerns was an anxiety that goods should be
produced by properly rewarded workpeople in a fulfilling manner, supervised by
people who recognised a responsibility to workers and customers alike. Here are
his thoughts on the subject, encapsulated:
All labour and effort, and all material resources, must be consciously devoted to
the good of the whole people as consumers; and all owners and business organis-
ers, and all workers, ceasing to be masters and exercisers of absolute rights, must
become the agents and stewards of the community, and of the world order of com-
munities. And consumption must be illuminated and uplifted by a religious sense
of the meaning and purpose of life; so that the waste and misuse of the stuff of life
may be ended, and all material be transformed into happy being, as in the little
bodies of the birds exulting in the blue awakening of an April day.
6
John K.Walton
2
G. Cross, Time and Money (London, ), ch. .
3
P. Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England, nd edn (London, ), pp. –.
4
J. Desforges, ‘Co-operation, labour and consumption in Liverpool, –’, in B. Lancaster
and P. Maguire, eds., Towards the Co-operative Commonwealth (Loughborough, ), p. .
5
See also T. Billington Greig, The Consumer in Revolt (London, n.d., c. ).
6
Redfern, Consumer’s Place, p. .
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Even if we leave the little birds to one side, this view of consumerism is a world
away from the secular celebrations of department stores and shopping mall
culture as cornucopia of opportunity, satisfying legitimate desires for transient
enjoyments and butterfly identities, which appear in some of the postmodern-
ist literature.
7
It is a strong version of the ‘moral economy’ of Co-operation: a
particularly overwrought rhetorical summation of the ideology of Co-operative
movement activists at the peak of that movement’s membership, influence and
hopes of remaking the world, though it was, perhaps, a vision hardly shared by
the stolid bulk of rank-and-file members whose main concern (it is alleged) was
to maximise the dividend on their purchases.
8
It is, however, a point of view on
consumerism which was growing in strength and moral authority during the
second half of the nineteenth century, and coming to a peak in the interwar
years, when the Co-op was truly a mass movement.
9
I have started with Co-
operation and its official ideals, indeed, because the movement pioneered many
aspects of urban mass consumption, in its own distinctive manner, in the face of
fierce opposition from private traders, and its comparatively recent eclipse at the
hands of chain stores and multinationals has produced a tendency for history to
be written for those who appear to be the winners, leaving this enormous and
influential organisation on the sidelines. The Co-op merits more attention than
it has received from historians, and we shall return to this theme.
10
Co-operation in its British retailing incarnation was pre-eminently an urban
movement; and whatever forms or aspects of consumerism we choose to empha-
sise, it was in the towns, where consumers aggregated, debated the quality and
desirability of goods, displayed themselves and their possessions in the public
arena, articulated their possession of cultural capital and distinguished their life
styles from others within shared grammars of consumption, sustained themselves
and enjoyed themselves, that consumption and consumerism had their most
concentrated and influential being.
11
Urban growth and consumer capitalism
went hand in hand. Consumerism shifted from being an elite phenomenon to
one accessible to the masses during the ‘age of great cities’ which was ushered in
by the rise of the world economy, the factory system (and its corollary the
sweated trades) and the communications revolutions in the middle decades of
the nineteenth century, and which provided a favourable environment for mass
consumption during the great commodity price fall of the last quarter of the
Towns and consumerism
17
R. Shields, ed., Lifestyle Shopping (London, ).
18
P. Gurney, Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, – (Manchester,
), pp. , and passim; and see also P. Johnson, Saving and Spending (Oxford, ).
19
Gurney, Co-operative Culture, Part .
10
See especially Gurney, Co-operative Culture; Lancaster and Maguire, eds., Co-operative
Commonwealth; North-West Labour History, (), special issue on the Co-operative movement;
S. Yeo, ed., New Views of Co-operation (London, ).
11
It is surprising that these relationships, as such, have been so little discussed with reference to the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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nineteenth century. This was a key transitional period, when new kinds of retail
outlet facilitated and encouraged consumer spending at working-class level: the
department store in its more democratic incarnations, the ‘multiples’ of the
‘retailing revolution’, the penny bazaars in covered markets which brought forth
Marks and Spencer, the stained-glass extravaganzas of the new shopping arcades,
the central Co-operative ‘emporia’, and so on.
12
The same period saw the rise
of professional sport for working-class audiences, the emergence of the music
hall and the popular seaside holiday and the novel availability of cheap conven-
ience foods, along with new opportunities for domestic leisure and the enhance-
ment of home comforts, as cheap by-law and suburban housing and (in some
cases) the advent of smaller families reduced pressure on space as well as
income.
13
The developments of these formative years were built on strikingly in the new
century, and for those who remained in work the renewed spell of falling prices
during the interwar years enabled novel aspirations to be pursued through
trading-up to more spacious semi-detached houses, home improvements,
domestic electrical goods and the cult of gardening, while dance halls and
cinemas became almost universal in the popular entertainment field, and the
spread of bicycles, motorcycles and even cars offered widening choices and
increased autonomy in the sphere of personal mobility.
14
Some aspects of these
developments were socially selective in their impact, requiring significant spare
disposable income and a capacity to save and budget; but others, like the cinema,
became practically universal.
15
In the post-war years these trends were to be
greatly intensified, as the variety of goods and brands on offer and the power and
sophistication of advertising and genuinely mass media became greatly enhanced
John K.Walton
12
Bill Lancaster, The Department Store:A Social History (Leicester, ); Gareth Shaw, ‘The evolu-
tion and impact of large-scale retailing in Britain’, and M. Purvis, ‘Co-operative retailing in
Britain’, in J. Benson and G. Shaw, eds., The Evolution of Retail Systems, c. – (Leicester,
), chs. and ; Goronwy Rees, St Michael: A History of Marks and Spencer (London, ); P.
Mathias, Retailing Revolution (London, ).
13
W. H. Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, – (London, ); John Benson, The Rise
of Consumer Society in Britain, – (London, ); T. Mason, Association Football and English
Society, – (Brighton, ); W. Vamplew, Pay Up and Play the Game (Cambridge, );
P. Bailey, ed., Music Hall (Milton Keynes, ); J. S. Bratton, ed., Music Hall (Milton Keynes,
); J. K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort (Leicester, ); J. K. Walton, Fish and Chips and
the British Working Class, – (Leicester, ).
14
R. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class (Oxford, ), ch. ; J. Stevenson, Social Conditions in Britain
between the Wars (London, ); N. Gray, The Worst of Times (London, ); M. Swenarton,
Homes Fit for Heroes (London, ); A. A. Jackson, Semi-Detached London (London, ); A.
Rybaczek, Homes Fit for Heroes in Inter-War Ashton (Ashton-under-Lyne, ); J. Turnbull,
‘Housing tenure and social structure: the impact of inter-war housing change on Carlisle’ (PhD
thesis, University of Lancaster, ); J. Foreman-Peck, S. Bowden and A. McKinlay, The British
Motor Industry (Manchester, ); S. O’Connell, ‘The social and cultural impact of the motor
car in Britain, –’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, ).
15
J. Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace (London, ).
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when real incomes rose unprecedentedly during the s and s, while the
development of age-specific and other niche markets (with the invention of the
teenager and the targeting of the child as consumer) complicated the issue
further.
16
This chapter traces these processes in all their ramifications, focusing
on the relationship between the rise of mass consumption and the urban setting
in which its earliest and most developed manifestations took place: a link which
has been surprisingly neglected in most of the current literature covering the
period from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
17
This neglect is all the more surprising because it is more than thirty years since
Tony Wrigley proffered a ‘simple model’which connected the migration-fuelled
growth of an increasingly large and anonymous London with a transition from
tradition to performance as the key element in the acquisition as opposed to the
inheritance of status, and an associated inflation of the importance of the pres-
entation of self through dress and the display of possessions in a new urban world
of competitive emulation.
18
The burgeoning literature on eighteenth-century
consumers and consumerism has built on these ideas and extended their logic
into lesser urban centres, most obviously in arguments for a provincial ‘urban
renaissance’ spreading its influence by way of the new resorts and the centres of
county administration and society,
19
and in the emphasis placed on the develop-
ment as consumers of women of the emergent urban middle classes of the eight-
eenth century, who described their possessions in lovingly elaborate language.
20
This latter approach offers a specifically urban focus on consumption, directed
more to the private than the public sphere. The new consumer values which are
presented in this literature also left their traces in the probate inventories which
listed the possessions of rural dwellers, and through the petty chapmen who
hawked ribbons and laces through the countryside; but their motive force was
the dynamo of urban gregariousness, which introduced new standards, set new
fashions and sent old certainties spinning.
21
Development of these and related
ideas in the increasingly urbanised setting of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies needs to be high on the agenda of urban historians. As matters stand,
however, the most recent survey of the ‘rise of consumer society’ in Britain over
the century after uses urban growth as a necessary backcloth to the central
theme, and comments that ‘it would be almost impossible to overlook the fact
Towns and consumerism
16
J. Obelkevich and P. Catterall, eds., Understanding Post-War British Society (London, ); but see
D. Fowler, The First Teenagers (London, ), ch. , for the interwar development of teenage con-
sumption.
17
Benson, Consumer Society, is (literally) a text-book example.
18
E. A. Wrigley, ‘A simple model of London’s importance’, P&P, (), –.
19
P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance (Oxford, ).
20
L. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain – (London, ); L.
Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes (London, ); A. Vickery, ‘Women of the local elite in
Lancashire –’ (PhD thesis, University of London, ).
21
M. Spufford, The Great Reclothing of Rural England (London, ); B. Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite
(Oxford, ).
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that retailing, sport and most other consumer services became concentrated
overwhelmingly in urban areas’, but does not engage with the relationship
between towns and consumption/consumerism as a theme or organising prin-
ciple.
22
This is also true of most of the previous work by historians on related
matters.
23
We need more focused work on the dynamic aspects of the interac-
tion between towns and consumption.
For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in fact, most of the historical
work linking towns and consumption focuses on developments in urban retail-
ing rather than directly on the changing attitudes and expectations of the con-
sumers themselves. The rise of the West End and other London shopping
districts, and the emergence of specialised retail nuclei in the provincial towns,
constitutes an important theme in this literature.
24
It is also important to be aware
of the survival and indeed expansion of retail markets, especially for food, in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial towns, as municipal investment
brought impressive new premises and regulation safeguarded quality and
hygiene.
25
We can also chart the continuing spread of corner shops as well as
specialised retail businesses during the second half of the nineteenth century and
beyond, as the former colonised new working-class neighbourhoods and the
latter extended along the tram routes and congregated in secondary shopping
centres in middle-class suburbs as urban sprawl proceeded.
26
The rise of the
multiple grocery (with the flagship firm of Lipton particularly well documented)
and the department store from the s and s, and the development of
chain stores such as Marks and Spencer and Woolworth’s from the turn of the
century and especially in the interwar years, made their own distinctive impact
on patterns of urban retailing provision. So did the spread of the Co-operative
movement itself, with its proliferation of societies, branches and later central
emporia into new areas from the mid-nineteenth century, and especially during
the late Victorian price fall, although the movement was to attain its greatest
John K.Walton
22
Benson, Consumer Society, p. .
23
But see H. Cunningham, ‘Leisure and culture’, in F. M. L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social
History of Britain, –, vol. : People and their Environment (Cambridge, ), ch. .
24
G. Shaw and M. T. Wild, ‘Retail patterns in the Victorian city’, Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, new series, (), –; G. Shaw, ‘Retail patterns’, in J. Langton and R. J.
Morris, eds., Atlas of Industrialising Britain, – (London, ), pp. –; Benson and
Shaw, eds., Evolution of Retail Systems, Part .
25
M. Phillips, ‘The evolution of markets and shops in Britain’, in Benson and Shaw, eds., Evolution
of Retail Systems; M. J. Winstanley, ‘Concentration and competition in the retail sector, c.
–’, in M. W. Kirby and M. B. Rose, eds., Business Enterprise in Modern Britain (London,
), pp. –; and research in progress by Debbie Hodson towards a Lancaster University PhD
thesis on urban markets in nineteenth-century Lancashire.
26
Winstanley, ‘Concentration and competition’, p. ; M. J. Winstanley, ed., A Traditional Grocer:
T.D.Smith’s of Lancaster,– (Lancaster, ), C. P. Hosgood, ‘The “pigmies of commerce”
and the working-class community: small shopkeepers in England –’, Journal of Social
History, (), –.
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geographical coverage and social penetration either side of the Second World
Wa r.
27
The impact of changing urban population distributions and transport net-
works on all this provides further grist to the mill of the quantitatively minded
historical geographer. But the charting of changing patterns of retail provision
is only part of the story.
An understanding of the social history of consumption needs to be based on
the manufacturing and marketing of products as well as their direct delivery to
consumers. It also needs to embrace not only the purchasing power and desires
of the consumers themselves, but also the process of shopping as a cultural activ-
ity in its own right, and the question of how objects are treated after the pur-
chase is completed.
28
The motives behind the purchase of goods, and the
circumstances under which this takes place, have been the subject of politically
charged debate. Adherents of the theory of conspicuous consumption have
tended to stress emulation as the motive force for growth in demand for goods
which go beyond sustaining a basic standard of living, whether in their function,
design or opulence of construction or finish.
29
But this line of approach is based
on a historically specific critique of the perceived behaviour of particular aspir-
ant social groups in the United States of the early twentieth century, founded in
earlier ‘commonsense’ social criticism advanced by novelists and journalists,
which perhaps transfers uneasily to notions of the rise of ‘mass’ consumerism;
and its psychological assumptions are somewhat reductive. Emulative bases for
consumer behaviour have also been associated with notions of a ‘trickle-down
effect’of prosperity and enjoyment from the wealthy to the poor, which are asso-
ciated with political positions justifying inequality and regarding the rich as nec-
essary innovators who should be left to get on with the task of creating new
needs and demands to which others may aspire.
30
Marxist approaches, on the other hand, grow out of Marx’s concept of com-
modity fetishism, which sets an aura or halo round goods made for sale, giving
them and the relationships which surround them a sacred and unchallengeable
status, and thereby, by extension, turning shopping into a sacrament.
31
This is a
fertile field for presentations of the manipulation of consumers by capitalist
manufacturers and retailers, who pull the heartstrings of desire through advertis-
ing and display, and encourage people to focus their attention on gaining access
Towns and consumerism
27
See above, nn. and .
28
B. Fine and E. Leopold, The World of Consumption (London, ).
29
T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (London, ); P. Johnson, ‘Conspicuous consumption
and working-class culture in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, TRHS, th series, (),
–; H. J. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (London, ), ch. .
30
Fine and Leopold, World of Consumption, pp. –; D. Miller, Material Culture and Mass
Consumption (Oxford, ), pp. –, bringing in a useful discussion of Bourdieu; M. Douglas
and B. Isherwood, The World of Goods (London, ), ch. .
31
K. Marx, Capital, th edn (London, ), pp. –; M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air
(London, ), pp. –.
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to a glittering array of (it is assumed) increasingly tawdry and trivial goods rather
than on what are seen as the real issues of workplace or political conflict. Workers
are thus doubly exploited, as both wage labourers and consumers, in the inter-
ests of sustaining profit in an ever-expanding system of manufacture and sale.
32
Critics of this frame of reference have pointed to patronising aspects of (espe-
cially) the cruder ascriptions of ‘false consciousness’, and these have been even
more evident in the work of cultural critics who have associated ‘mass con-
sumption’ with surface gloss, cheapness and nastiness.
33
A more sophisticated,
and highly influential, mode of analysis has been provided by Pierre Bourdieu,
who has emphasised the importance of the distinctions engendered between
consumer goods and cultural products, through the development of systems of
discrimination which place some items and activities above others in an elab-
orate pecking order. These distinctions are founded in the acquisition of ‘cultu-
ral capital’through education and socialisation, which generates sets of consumer
preferences which are shared across social and occupational groups and whose
deeply ingrained assumptions generate evaluations whose exclusions and down-
gradings, at least, can become almost automatic. Above the level of mass con-
sumption, and displaying contempt for it in most forms, floats a hierarchy of
intersecting preferences and expectations, where consumption patterns are
fuelled less by crude emulation than by inherited or acquired systems of taste and
discrimination. Bourdieu seems both to expose and endorse the system he pre-
sents, whose logic seems to detach ‘mass’ consumerism from these more sophis-
ticated upper layers and intersecting circles, convincingly undermining
‘trickle-down’ ideas, and whose validity as a basis for critical analysis can be
extended from the France of the s in which his fieldwork was based. But
we should not neglect the capacity of the lower levels of consumers, excluded
from this system by their lack of bourgeois forms of cultural capital, developing
their own distinctions and deploying their own forms of cultural capital, display-
ing agency and choice in a market place whose complexity is traduced by the
vocabulary of ‘mass’ and ‘masses’. Indeed, anthropological approaches have
stressed the ways in which the consumption of goods and services is central to
social interaction, which may entail consumers attaching their own meanings to
and deriving their own individual or communal satisfactions from what is on
offer. Consumption within the capitalist market place need not be passive, and
suppliers of goods and services need to be responsive to demand as well as trying
to create and channel it.
34
This is compatible with a Marxian reading of devel-
opments, mediated through Gramsci, in which consumers react to and impact
John K.Walton
32
Fine and Leopold, World of Consumption, chs. –.
33
J. Golby and W. Purdue, The Civilisation of the Crowd (London, ), p. .
34
P. Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. R. Nice (London, ); Miller, Material Culture, ch. ; Douglas
and Isherwood, World of Goods, chs. –; Golby and Purdue, The Civilisation of the Crowd (London,
).
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on the nature and circumstances of what is provided for them, while participat-
ing in a process which is ultimately orchestrated from without, and not primar-
ily for their own benefit. They are given choices, but not within a framework
of their own conscious choosing; and this limits the array of possibilities open
to them, although they will not necessarily be aware of this beyond a conscious-
ness of the limitations of their resources in time and money.
35
Such are the
debates on consumption in ‘industrial society’ or ‘modernity’, which brings us
through to the middle decades of the twentieth century. It might be argued that
presentations from a ‘cultural studies’ perspective of the nature of consumption
in ‘post-industrial’ society, the world of the shopping mall and the out-of-town
retail complex, of the integration of shopping and leisure on special sites for
those who can afford access, lie beyond the scope of a chapter with this time-
span, on the assumption that ways of theorising post-industrial societies are not
readily applicable to their forebears.
36
These controversies are based overwhelmingly on activities which went on in
urban spaces, although many of the consumers came into town from surround-
ing areas to participate in the rituals of consumption, and we must not regard
town and country as binary opposites or keep them in separate compartments.
37
Towns have been backcloths or bystanders in most of the literature, but some
writers have acknowledged the surging excitements of the new environments of
urban sociability, the swirling colour and bustle of the public spaces in which con-
sumption flourished and was promoted.
38
The transformation of London’s West
End from the s and s, with the rise of department stores and fashion-
able shopping areas, has been mapped with particular attention; and the increas-
ing visibility of women as shoppers in these contested spaces (alongside female
service workers and prostitutes, in an environment where perceived ambiguities
of status and intent issued forth in frequent sexual harassment) brought colour
and conflict, pleasure and peril to such public urban settings.
39
Ladies shopping
for pleasure increasingly came in from peripheral suburbia, by omnibus, train or
(towards the turn of the century) tram if not by carriage; and the desire to use
the expanding purchasing power of middle-class incomes to embellish detached
domesticity generated a genre of shopping for fabrics and furniture as well as
Towns and consumerism
35
See above, n. .
36
T. Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (London, ), tries to push notions of
the origins of a ‘commodity culture’to the Victorian middle classes; but he has to wrench his evi-
dence out of context, misreading his material all too visibly in the process, to present this inter-
esting argument.
37
P. J. Waller, Town, City and Nation (Oxford, ); R. E. Pahl, Divisions of Labour (London, ).
38
Berman, All That Is Solid, Parts and , deals with Paris and St Petersburg in ways which might
be transferred to the British setting.
39
J. R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (London and Chicago, ), ch. ; P. J. Atkins, ‘The
spatial configuration of class solidarity in London’s West End, –’, UHY, (),
–.
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