Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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to put on show the cultural capital of discerning cognoscenti.
86
This was to prove
an enduring dilemma: to provide consumer goods the mass market could afford,
it seemed necessary to exploit the labour of urban toilers in stressful factory set-
tings or insanitary garrets and workshops, to depend on cheap and nasty mat-
erials and indeed to push distant plantation workers into a re-creation of
slavery.
87
But for those who could afford to enjoy shopping, and who did not
need to see whence their purchases came, the towns came to offer a cornucopia
of displayed delights.
Over the century after , and especially during the transitional late
Victorian years, urban retailing and shopping were transformed. The presenta-
tion of goods was particularly important here, as the spread of extensive glass-
fronted windows (building on technological innovation in the glass industry)
enabled consumer items to be displayed in enticing array, with ticketed prices.
The new multiple grocers and tea dealers, with Lipton leading the way from the
early s, were important innovators here. Such developments shifted the role
of the new town-centre shops visibly from meeting needs to stimulating
demand: customers were made aware of a range of possibilities which they might
not otherwise have considered, and enabled to consider the financial implica-
tions without the potential embarrassment of inquiry.
88
The rise of gas lighting
around mid-century boosted this trend in two ways, as retailers anxious to illu-
minate their premises were among the pioneer private users, while the most
important early market for gas companies was the provision of street lighting
which made window shopping both safer and more comfortable.
89
Electricity,
gathering momentum at the turn of the century, was the next stage; and in these
fields the legitimacy of municipal intervention in the market place was widely
recognised, as the ratepayers obtained access to a consumer democracy which
might (at least in theory) keep prices low and sustain the standards of services on
which the consumer provision of private enterprise depended. Much the same
applied to urban tramways, which became essential to the articulating of the
larger towns as systems of consumption as well as production towards the turn
of the century.
90
But the role of advertising extended far beyond window dressing and street
display. Its rapid development through press, poster and stunt was a theme of the
mid- and late Victorian years. It was overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon.
This was where the posters, exhibitions and other displays were concentrated,
John K.Walton
86
J. Press and C. E. Harvey, William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian England (Manchester,
); F. MacCarthy, The Simple Life (London, ).
87
Schmeichen, Sweated Industries, pp. –.
88
Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight; M. J. Winstanley, The Shopkeeper’s World ‒
(Manchester, ); Lancaster, Department Store; Mathias, Retailing.
89
J. F. Wilson, Lighting the Town (London, ), p. .
90
P. Kinchin, Tea and Taste (Wendlebury, ), p. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
increasingly taking over strategic locations and asserting their messages on vehi-
cles and at transport junctions, and making their own controversial contribution
to the changing public aesthetic of the city. This was where the emergent adver-
tising agencies had their offices, and where the newspapers, magazines and mail
order catalogues that conveyed the fashions and the prices to the suburbs and the
countryside were based. Advertising lived by, and formed part of, the commu-
nications revolution of which the towns were the nerve centres.
91
The sugges-
tion that middle-class Britain had become a ‘commodity culture’ by the late
nineteenth century, with advertisers’ representations of goods dominating
people’s perceptions of themselves and their world and infiltrating the language
and symbols of communication, is interesting, if based more on assertion than
on convincing evidence; but crucial changes were indeed concentrated into
these years.
92
Urban Britain, and especially the cities and fashionable shopping
centres, was becoming an information system for communicating, manufactur-
ing and extending desires. Here developed both the production and the market-
ing of collectables for a new breed of collectors, who accumulated Staffordshire
figures, Stevengraph silk pictures and bookmarks, or holiday souvenirs embla-
zoned with seaside scenes or municipal heraldry, classifying, ordering and con-
trolling such possessions and insuring the more expensive ones through the new
home contents policies of a burgeoning industry.
93
Possessions to embellish and
enjoy were available at all levels in different parts of the town, from the back-
street flea market to the second-hand bookstall, the curiosity shop, the special-
ist shop for those of (perhaps) a musical or horticultural bent, and on a more
exalted plane the bespoke tailor, the high-class haberdasher and the department
store. And at all levels, not just those of the largest or more specialised establish-
ments, this exuberance of provision multiplied, with or without the direct aid
of advertising, throughout the second half of the century. It was at this time, too,
that the growing and proliferating resort towns and suburbs began to advertise
themselves as places to be consumed in a competitive market place, through
poster campaigns and guide-books organised by committees of tradesmen and,
when this became legal, by municipal governments.
94
New places of refreshment for shoppers also proliferated in and around the
central retail areas which were cohering in the later nineteenth century. They
were particularly necessary as comfortable refuges for women, when attempts to
stake out shopping streets as legitimate territory for unaccompanied females led
to sexual harassment from men in search of the prostitutes who also frequented
such districts, while pubs and chop-houses were unwelcoming and public
Towns and consumerism
91
E. S. Turner, The Shocking History of Advertising (London, ); Fraser, Mass Market, ch. .
92
Richards, Commodity Culture.
93
Briggs, Victorian Things, ch. ; and information from Dr Roger Ryan.
94
Winstanley, Shopkeeper’s World; Benson and Shaw, Evolution of Retail Systems; Walton, English
Seaside Resort, ch. ; J. Urry, Consuming Places (London and New York, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
conveniences were in short supply.
95
Tea rooms and department store restaurants
provided suitable resting places and havens for relaxed discussion. Not that the
former, at least, were necessarily gendered space: men were made as welcome as
women in the famous Glasgow tea rooms of the s onwards, where Miss
Cranston and her colleagues offered decorous fare in surroundings which might
be decorated and furnished to the distinctive designs of Charles Rennie
Mackintosh. Lower down the social scale late Victorian London and the larger
English cities acquired the less pretentious and more mass-produced delights of
the Lyons corner house or the cafés of the Aerated Bread Company, while urban
Scotland and Wales learned to love their Italian cafés and ice-cream parlours.
96
Different levels of provision were needed, and customers who were insecure in
their manners and social status might be intimidated by imposing floorwalkers in
the department stores or genteel waitresses in the cafés or restaurants. As the joys
of consumer shopping spread among the urban working class in the new century
other hierarchies of provision and perception became apparent. Brown’s of
Chester, the epitome of the high-class provincial department store with its almost
tangible aura of selectness, encountered some difficulties when it tried to extend
the social range of its customers in the interwar years, not least from a restaurant
manageress who was unwilling to add fish and chips to the menu.
97
Mass-
Observation surveys from the early s found that many people preferred not
to shop at the store they regarded as having the highest reputation in their town,
because it was perceived to be too expensive (customers paid extra for the name),
or because it had a reputation for the off-hand treatment of less prosperous cus-
tomers.
98
This is a reminder of the growing importance of store employees, espe-
cially shop assistants, in the creation of a consumer-friendly environment, and of
the ways in which working-class retailing employees with genteel pretensions, or
subjected to strict disciplines of workplace behaviour, might discourage their
peers from deriving full participation in and enjoyment of the cornucopia of
consumer choice.
These and other limitations notwithstanding, town and city centres were
becoming exciting places in which growing numbers of shoppers could escape
from the home and the neighbourhood, fantasise about possible purchases, assess
what was on display, weigh up the pros and cons of purchase while being con-
tinually intoxicated by the enchantments of new possibilities, take possession of
the chosen goods, discuss strategies and purchases with friends in secure, com-
fortable surroundings and enjoy displaying goods which had already been
acquired and could be put on show before the gaze of others.
99
Rationing and
John K.Walton
95
Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, pp. –.
96
Kinchin, Tea and Taste; C. Hughes, Lime, Lemon and Sarsparilla: (Bridgend, ); T. Colpi, The
Italian Factor (Edinburgh, ), chs. –.
97
Lancaster, Department Store; Mass-Observation, Browns and Chester (London, ), pp. –.
98
L. M. Harris, Buyer’s Market (London, ), ch. .
99
Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
privation during and after the two world wars interrupted this process but stoked
up an even more ardent desire for a return to what was now normality. The con-
sumer districts of towns appealed to the spirits of emulation and self-expression
within the shared overarching idioms of fashion and convention, while the
excitement of hunting for the desired goods was compounded by the desire to
drive a good bargain. These apparent contradictions, these circles which were
squared so readily in daily practice, were founded in values which were every bit
as Victorian as twentieth-century: we need to remember that stereotypes of
Victorian thrift and caution draw more on propaganda and injunction than lived
experience, and that, as Taine had noted in the s, there were plenty of
hedonistic middle-class Victorians who spent to the limits of their income.
100
Developments in urban retailing merely enabled them, and their heirs, to
indulge these propensities more easily and with an ever-widening range of
choice, which extended increasingly, as transport improved, to choosing
between rival urban shopping centres as well as within individual ones.
101
Towns, and especially cities, thus became theatres of conspicuous consump-
tion and display in a public setting open to the gaze of all. Shopping areas were
policed with increasing attentiveness, and the more secure they became in terms
of marginalising threatening transgressions of class and gender boundaries, the
freer the shoppers themselves became to put themselves on show, to flirt and to
enjoy the anonymity of the crowded street. Women as well as men could claim
the privileges of the flaneur of the boulevard, strolling, observing, enjoying their
own daring, experiencing the safe excitements and unscripted encounters of
urban spaces which were increasingly consecrated to leisure and consumption:
the parks and promenades which were proliferating in urban (and not just resort)
settings during the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as the shop-
ping streets and arcades.
102
This was, admittedly, a phenomenon of larger cities
rather than smaller towns; but even the modest Lancashire cotton and engineer-
ing town of Accrington had its turn-of-the-century Avenue Parade, slightly
wider than the average street, and with little front gardens to the terrace houses,
from which the local petty bourgeoisie could be viewed as they promenaded to
a new public open space and viewpoint. By the turn of the century, enclosed
leisure spaces beyond the street were increasingly available to women without
their respectability being compromised, as the more opulent music halls went
up-market and brought in sophisticated systems of programme regulation and
internal subdivision of the audience.
103
In the interwar years the cinema and even
the dance-hall followed this path, although the latter remained disputed moral
territory, providing opportunities for consumers to present themselves via their
clothing and accessories in a situation of overt sexual negotiation. But not all
Towns and consumerism
100
Taine, Notes on England, chs. –.
101
J. Herson, ‘Victorian Chester: a city of change and ambiguity’, in R. Swift, ed., Victorian Chester
(Liverpool, ), pp. –; Harris, Buyer’s Market, ch. .
102
Berman, All That Is Solid, ch. .
103
See above, n. .
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commercialised urban leisure spaces promoted consumption by display: the foot-
ball ground is an obvious example, with its workaday throngs of men in un-
ostentatious dress, watching players who also travelled by the same public
transport and whose life styles were constrained by a maximum wage.
104
For
those who were excluded from such enclosed arenas through limited resources
in time or money, or chose to vary their repertoire of social display on a day
when other opportunities were limited, the Sunday morning church parade for
the affluent and respectable was matched by the Sunday evening ‘monkey run’
which brought young people into informal contact along an agreed area of
street, and enabled mutual inspection to lead to closer contact if initial appear-
ances were promising.
105
Here too, display within a consensual array of conven-
tions was an important element in ‘clicking’ or finding a partner. Less consumer
orientated were the gatherings of young men and youths for gambling and the
exchange of ideas on the corners of back streets, which were common in indus-
trial towns by the early twentieth century; but even here conversation might
readily turn to clothing or bicycles and the fortunes of professional football teams
as well as neighbours and workplace politics.
106
By the early twentieth century women were increasingly in evidence in
public, on pleasure bent, and not necessarily under the visible tutelage of men,
whether in the city or at the seaside (where men were often absent during the
week, coming to join their holidaymaking families by the ‘husband train’ or
‘husband boat’, significantly a popular subject of often racy humour).
107
The
dangers and delights of this transition, which began in earnest in the late
Victorian years, was accentuated by the First World War, and continued there-
after, have been brilliantly chronicled by Judith Walkowitz.
108
The balance of
costs and benefits remains a vexed issue, recalling related arguments about con-
sumerism and class. Should we emphasise the gains to women which accrued
from the new opportunities to colonise and penetrate new kinds of urban public
space, to make choices and to affirm identities, as shoppers and pleasure-seekers?
Or should we bemoan their exploitation as manipulated consumers, prisoners
of the pressure to emulate and the demands of a cynically orchestrated fashion
cycle? The mid-Victorian fads for crinolines and (more enduringly) corsetry and
tight-lacing might seem to favour the second interpretation, although later
fashions were to prove less constraining and distorting to the female frame.
Significantly, perhaps, the ‘second coming’ of the crinoline was successfully
resisted; but corsetry is more complicated, and we need a better grasp of what
John K.Walton
104
Richards, Age of the Dream Palace; L. Oliver, ‘Limitation or liberation: a study of women’s leisure
in Bolton c. –’ (PhD thesis, University of Lancaster, ).
105
S. Humphries, A Secret World of Sex (London, ), p. .
106
Bill Naughton, Saintly Billy (Oxford, ), ch. ; M. Childs, Labour’s Apprentices (London,
), pp. –.
107
Walton, English Seaside Resort, pp. –.
108
Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, ch. .
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these and other items of clothing meant to the wearers.
109
Hannah Cullwick, the
domestic servant whose diaries provide such a curious and controversial window
on the s and s, is an interesting example of a woman who drank unac-
companied in pubs and made occasional excursions to the theatre or the dance
hall, while taking pride in the unfashionable nature of her affectionately
described clothing and regarding her deliberately down-at-heel presentation of
self as providing a measure of protection against annoyance or molestation.
110
These were unusually teasing ambiguities, but they draw attention to the
difficulty of categorising female consumer behaviour in the bipolar terms
beloved of so many Victorian commentators; and there remains plenty of room
for debate on these issues, especially in the twentieth century. What is clear is
that growing numbers of women came to enjoy shopping for its own sake, and
that this development, which began in earnest in the eighteenth century, spread
and ramified from mid-Victorian times, boosted by the comfortable environ-
ments of the department store, the arcade and the carefully policed, specialised
shopping street. But to describe shopping and consumerism, as many men were
prone to do, as a female phenomenon or even a female malady (a notion
expressed by emergent interest in women as shoplifters), is to neglect the attrac-
tions of these activities for men, in their own right as well as in the role of com-
panion or appendage to consuming women.
111
At the top end of the scale, mid-Victorian men were far from being immune
to the attractions of shopping selectively for a higher quality of clothing, or
tobacco, or wine, or horse; and they often had their say in home decoration and
furnishing. The specialist cigar and pipe tobacco shop, for example, became a
masculine space, at least on the purchaser’s side of the counter, catering to layers
of constructed masculine expertise in the symbolic grammar and ascribed attrib-
utes of a complex hierarchy of goods. The expanding range of goods and oppor-
tunities affected both sexes, despite male rhetoric which consigned shopping
mania (like gossip) to a female realm. Too obsessive an interest in personal
appearance might compromise manliness and invite mockery, as in the (at best)
ambivalent music hall portrayals of the ‘swell’ and the ‘masher’; but the main
targets here were those who dressed above their station for effect. Frank Mort’s
subtle analysis of how Burton the High Street tailors negotiated these contradic-
tions in the s, striving to cultivate a restrained, gentlemanly image while
extending the market for their suits down the social scale, and emphasising how
Towns and consumerism
109
E. Wilson, Adorned in Dreams (London, ); D. Kunzle, Fashion and Fetishism (Totowa, N.J.,
); M. Valverde, ‘The love of finery: fashion and the fallen woman’, Victorian Studies,
(–); C. Finch, ‘Hooked and buttoned together’, Victorian Studies, (–).
110
L. Stanley, ed., The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick (London, ), pp. , , .
111
Lancaster, Department Store; E. Showalter, The Female Malady (London, ); E. S. Abelson,
When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York,
); and see now V. De Grazia and E. Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things (New York, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
their tasteful products would appeal to the right sort of woman as well as to male
peers and superiors, brings out the constraints which limited and defined a main-
stream set of male consumer values throughout the period in this delicate terri-
tory, where gender identities were both expressed and potentially compromised
though the commercially bounded presentation of self in the urban setting.
112
By the later nineteenth century, and with increasing impact in the twentieth,
more consensually masculine interests were being catered for at the level of
(especially) white-collar workers and the skilled working class, with the growing
interest in ‘hobbies’ generating a market for tools, raw materials, blueprints,
advice manuals and specialised journals.
113
The spread of allotments, greatly
encouraged in wartime, and of council estates encouraged an enthusiasm for gar-
dening which was fed through shopping as well as swapping, and the growth of
‘do-it-yourself ’ activity among domesticated men with shorter working hours
developed alongside interest in tinkering with radios, gramophones and (by the
interwar years) motor vehicles.
114
Women’s consumerism was more resolutely
gendered in terms of shopping as an activity in itself, with the department store
emerging as a particular female haven; but men’s, though differently organised
and often differently labelled, became no less pervasive and important.
115
We must consider age as well as gender. The development of consumer
expenditure on upper-class children, to make them objects of display as well as
to promote their own enjoyment, was an eighteenth-century theme, which
passed down the social scale to generate middle-class demand for elaborate dolls
and mechanical toys by the mid-nineteenth century.
116
Children – or at least
adolescents – as urban consumers on their own account constitute a later phe-
nomenon, but the assumption that the working-class teenage consumer was a
product of novel affluence and high employment levels in the s has been
convincingly challenged. Teenage wages in the interwar years were not uni-
formly ‘tipped up’ to boost the family budget: they might also fund trips to the
cinema and the dance hall, magazines, hobbies and attempts to cultivate the
appearance (including sophisticated smoking mannerisms) of the film stars on
display.
117
Even this was a matter of emphasis rather than complete novelty:
Edwardian lads with wages and few commitments might also be consumers of
entertainment, cigarettes and clothing, and the teenage ‘scuttlers’ of turn-of-the-
century Salford had their own distinctive gang uniform involving clogs, heavy
John K.Walton
112
F. Mort, Cultures of Consumption (London, ), pp. –; M. Hilton, ‘Constructing tobacco:
perspectives on consumer culture in Britain –’ (PhD thesis, University of Lancaster,
); Childs, Labour’s Apprentices, pp. –; Bailey, Music Hall.
113
McKibbin, Ideologies of Class (Oxford, ), ch. .
114
Ibid., pp. – and passim; Constantine, ‘Amateur gardening and popular recreation’; D. Crouch
and C. Ward, The Allotment (London, ).
115
Lancaster, Department Store.
116
J. H. Plumb, ‘The new world of children in the eighteenth century’, P&P, (), –;
Thompson and Yeo, Unknown Mayhew, pp. –; K. D. Brown, The British Toy Business: A
History since (London, ).
117
Fowler, The First Teenagers, chs. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
belt and brass buckle. Teenagers had been staple consumers of the music hall and
more disreputable urban entertainments, along with ‘penny dreadfuls’ and deli-
cacies hawked through the streets, for much longer than this, wherever their
position in the family economy gave them enough ascendancy to enable them
to retain a portion of their wages at a time when they were not shackled by
responsibility (a problem which many working-class men evaded anyway).
118
All
this responded to essentially urban opportunities in juvenile labour markets and
shopping and entertainment provision. Access to the emergent consumer society
was determined by the poverty cycle as well as by actual levels of income and
access to goods and services, and teenage spending power and subcultures were
forces to be reckoned with long before the Second World War.
Critiques of the frivolous and destabilising consumer expenditure of
working-class adolescents, often in association with fears of the moral and phys-
ical decline of the race in corrupt and debilitating urban surroundings, were
much in evidence throughout the period. They formed part of an array of
attacks on consumer spending which blamed it for inducing secondary poverty,
undermining forethought and thrift, diverting expenditure from the substantial
and well-made to the tawdry and meretricious, and (to some critics) distracting
from due attention to the higher seriousnesses of religion, labour organisation
or politics.
119
As in the influential case of Ruskin, critics of consumer taste (as
expressed at levels from the commissioners of civic architecture downwards)
equated these temptations with urban life, and anti-consumerism tended also to
be anti-urbanism.
120
Such attacks came from within the working class as well as
from socially superior proponents of rational recreation and evangelical abstemi-
ousness. Protestant nonconformists and early socialists alike were prominent in
challenging the emergent consumer culture of the Lancashire cotton towns by
the turn of the century, attacking the general preference for Blackpool, the music
hall and commercialised leisure, and the liking for strongly flavoured condiments
and shop-produced food, as opposed to healthy outdoor recreations and virtu-
ous plain cooking. Female mill workers were accused of putting the acquisition
and flaunting of cheap finery above the accumulation of savings and the culti-
vation of domestic skills and virtues.
121
This was the first act in what was to be
a recurring drama in different parts of Britain.
Nor was criticism confined to working-class consumption, which was
assumed to entail culpably living beyond one’s means. The mid- and late
Towns and consumerism
118
A. Davies and S. Fielding, eds., Workers’Worlds (Manchester, ); Childs, Labour’s Apprentices;
Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives; Ross, Love and Toil.
119
C. Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture (Manchester, ); P. Joyce, Visions
of the People (Cambridge, ); D. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy (Oxford, ), discuss
these issues.
120
M. Hardman, Ruskin and Bradford (Manchester, ).
121
Harvey Taylor, ‘The ideological origins of a British outdoor movement’ (PhD thesis, University
of Lancaster, ); Allen Clarke, The Effects of the Factory System (Littleborough, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Victorian years saw an outpouring of sermons against the worship of money and
material goods, exhortations both to thrift and to charity, and urgings of the
blessings of simplicity and the gross vulgarity of heavy over-ornamentation.
Would-be arbiters of consumer taste wrote household manuals to advocate
purity and plainness of line and function. The consumers themselves seem to
have taken little notice.
122
Changing fashions owed more to advertisements and
personal preferences, mediated through the consensus of a variety of social
circles which formed a myriad of niche markets for particular products, as
befitted an economy in which true mass production was later in arriving than
might be assumed: store inventories and mail-order catalogues were thick with
goods in endless variety.
123
Even within this climate, after all, products failed as
well as succeeding. Items of consumption were available to ever-widening circles
of purchasers, whose numbers were expanded still further by second-hand stalls,
bazaars and bring-and-buy sales, but variegation outweighed standardisation
even in the interwar years, as the enormous proliferation of models and
specifications produced by British car firms bears witness.
124
The masses might
be consuming, but to call the outcome mass consumption before, perhaps, the
s would be to oversimplify.
Nevertheless, the rise of consumer society, driven by urban forces of manu-
facture, advertising, retailing, shopping, consumption and personal display, was
inexorable. The arguments between thrift and consumer enjoyment were
increasingly being resolved in favour of the latter, although house purchase in
the long run and holiday or Christmas enjoyment in the short enjoined short-
term thrift in the pursuit of deferred gratification. For growing numbers of
people, including those who remained in employment during the deflationary
interwar years, thrift could coexist with instant enjoyment: both could be
afforded. Workers in the Lancashire cotton towns, who had pioneered this happy
resolution of domestic economic conflict before the First World War, found it
harder to sustain in the bleak years of the s; but the sunrise industries of the
South and Midlands were able to take up the running. Here were the best
markets for businessmen who followed the advice and statistics deployed in the
‘Where to sell’ manuals which proliferated in the interwar years.
125
The conflict
between maximising free time for uncommodified enjoyment, and maximising
income to spend in the consumer market place, was resolved for most people in
favour of the latter alternative by the s; and consumerism offered industry
John K.Walton
122
Briggs, Victorian Things, pp. –.
123
R. Samuel, ‘The workshop of the world: steam power and hand technology in mid-Victorian
Britain’, History Workshop Journal, (), –; A. Adburgham, ed., Victorian Shopping: Harrod’s
Catalogue (Newton Abbot, ).
124
O’Connell, ‘Social and cultural impact’; R.A. Church, The Rise and Decline of the British Motor
Industry (London, ).
125
Sell to Britain through the Daily Mail (London, , and subsequent edns); G. Harrison and F. C.
Mitchell, eds., The Home Market:A Handbook of Statistics (London, n.d., c. ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
the opportunity to deploy the carrot as well as the stick in motivating workforces
by offering material rewards for time discipline and productivity.
126
This did not
always work, as the enduring preference of miners for St Monday bore witness;
and some consumer opportunities, like mid-week football matches, cut into
working hours. In the years of rationing during and after the Second World War
the desire for consumer goods was put on hold and surplus wages were chan-
nelled into services such as professional sport, the cinema and holidaymaking.
127
The balance soon began to change in the s, as the flow of goods began to
revive and shopping, advertising and the media began a new round of transfor-
mation. Revealingly, perhaps, there was debate over whether hobbies and other
outside interests improved or undermined performance at the workplace; but
shopping and entertainment posed no such dilemma.
128
There were downsides to all this, or so cultural critics continued to argue.
Working-class communities were disrupted by competitive consumption, as part
of a wider pathology of post-war changes involving rehousing and the rise of an
assertive youth culture. Consumerism, it was argued, encouraged theft and
aggression, and replaced dignity, frugality and stoicism with self-indulgence.
Problems of relative affluence, which have persisted into the recent revival of
poverty and unemployment, have been highlighted by cultural critics from
Richard Hoggart to Jeremy Seabrook, who have in turn been accused of con-
descension and failure to appreciate the ways in which working-class people
remake what is on offer to form satisfying and empowering identities.
129
This
goes beyond the remit of this chapter. What is clear, however, is that the ideals
of Percy Redfern, with which we began, have been left to languish with the
decline of the Co-operative movement. This was at its peak in membership
terms on either side of the Second World War, and during the s it pioneered
the introduction of supermarkets and took pride in trumpeting its investment in
new stores which expressed the favoured architectures of the time.
130
Mass-
Observation’s Bolton surveys already identified seeds of complacency and rigid-
ity in the late s, however, and the movement failed to recruit a new
generation of activists in what seemed the secure environment of the post-war
welfare state.
131
By a new Mass-Observation survey was damning:
Towns and consumerism
126
Cross, Time and Money, pp. –.
127
J. K. Walton, ‘The world’s first working-class seaside resort? Blackpool revisited, –’,
Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, (), p. ; N. Fishwick, English
Football and Society, – (Manchester, ), p. .
128
McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. –.
129
R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London, ); J. Seabrook, City Close-Up (London, ); and
numerous other works by both authors; Cross, Time and Money, ch. ; and from a feminist per-
spective Beatrix Campbell, Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and Politics in the s (London, ), pp.
–.
130
This Is Progress:A Pictorial Record of Co-operative Store and Shop Development (Manchester, ).
131
Gurney, Co-operative Culture, p. .
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