The Landscape of Consumption

Shopping Streets and Cultures in Western Europe, 1600-1900

Clé Lesger, J. Furneé, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137314062
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This volume brings together research on retailing, shopping and urban space; themes that have attracted wide interest in recent decades. The authors argue that the 'modernity' of the nineteenth century is often over-emphasised at the expense of recognising earlier innovation.

1

Shopping Streets and Cultures from a Long-Term and Transnational Perspective

An Introduction

Clé Lesger and Jan Hein Furnée

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, comparing the shopping streets of Paris and London became a stock element of English and French travel accounts. In 1810, the French writer J. B. Barjaud, like many of his compatriots, praised the ‘grandeur’ and the ‘magnificence’ of London shops as ‘one of the particular characteristics’ of the British capital. In turn, English travellers were deeply impressed by the ‘brilliant’ arcades and the ‘marvellous’ merchandise in the Palais-Royal. Travellers also praised the increasing exchange of modern retail innovations between the two capitals. In 1819, J. N. Quatremère de Roissy enthusiastically reported how only recently Paris’s shopkeepers had started ‘copying’ the exteriors, ornamentations and ‘general arrangements’ of their English neighbours. Yet this constant competition fuelled sneering comments as well. As French travellers generally looked down upon the small number of attractive shopping arcades in London, English writers were happy to scorn the lack of brilliant bazaars in the French capital.¹

The advent of modern retail techniques and modern consumer culture has continued to be the core issue of the expanding historiography on retailing and shopping in Western Europe.² In recent decades, most historians working on the nineteenth century have argued that the so-called ‘retail revolution’, and especially the rise of the department store from 1850, was the ultimate ‘take off’ moment for modern retailing and consumer society.³ Simultaneously, however, a growing number of historians working on early modern retailing have demonstrated that most of the key elements usually regarded as modern – such as fixed prices, lavishly decorated shop windows, and the practice of shopping for pleasure – had already been developed in the eighteenth century and, in some cases, much earlier.⁴ Surprisingly, historians whose specialisations lie either side of the traditional gulf of 1800 have not, on the whole, taken up the challenge to discuss their conflicting arguments or to readdress processes of innovation and continuity in a long-term perspective. Even what is potentially the most interesting meeting ground, the first decades of the nineteenth century, has largely remained a terra incognita.⁵

From a geographical perspective, the uneven development of historiography on retailing and shopping is even more striking. In Britain, the body of research on both the early modern period and the nineteenth century is very impressive and research on France is also making good progress. However, German historians have almost entirely focused on the late nineteenth century, while Belgian scholars have primarily surveyed the early modern period, and the Dutch are only just entering the scene.⁶ In contrast to the numerous accounts of contemporary travellers who constantly compared retail strategies and shopping practices in foreign cities, historians studying either period have mainly worked within their national boundaries and comparative research has scarcely been developed in any systematic way.⁷ Beyond mere comparison, there are many reasons to embrace the recent ‘transnational turn’ and to study the history of retailing and shopping in this period from the perspectives of cultural transfer and histoire croisée. Following and stimulating the desires of millions of consumers, foreign and native shopkeepers bought and sold commodities from all over Europe and beyond. But, as indicated above, they also constantly exchanged and appropriated foreign retailing strategies, while local authorities repeatedly restructured the layout and the regulation of shopping streets and other retail premises on the basis of foreign examples. How these processes of influence and appropriation worked exactly has, however, hardly been questioned.⁸

This volume invites the reader to study the history of retailing and shopping in Western Europe in both the early modern period and the nineteenth century from a more systematic long-term, comparative and transnational perspective. The book focuses on the history of shopping streets as an overarching research theme, enabling us to link and integrate a broad variety of related themes: the spatial location and development of shops and shopping streets in a changing urban fabric; the rise of the ‘fixed’ shop in the spatial, economic and social context of other retail facilities; the advent of new retail institutions such as arcades, bazaars and department stores; the design and regulation of shopping streets by local authorities; the shifting exterior presentation of shops; and the changing social and cultural behaviour of consumers, including the increasing cultivation of shopping for pleasure. Combining quantitative and qualitative research approaches and using a wide variety of sources – from tax registers, almanacs and municipal administration, to newspapers, novels, prints and travel accounts – the volume brings together fresh research on shopping streets in five neighbouring countries and in regions that strongly cultivated mutual relations.

What is the overall picture that emerges from the various chapters in this book, and what does the book add to the existing historiography? Though we are only at the outset of a truly comparative and transnational approach to the history of retailing, shopping streets and shopping culture in the longer term, it is still possible to use the contributions in this volume and the available literature to mark the contours of some important themes.

The location of shops in early modern and nineteenth-century cities is the first theme, for which several chapters provide new information. In each of the cities discussed in this volume, the marketplace and the major thoroughfares were the oldest commercial locations. This, of course, should not come as a surprise. Traditionally the market was the principal arena of retail activities and along busy streets shopkeepers and other retailers could intercept potential customers and entice them in more or less sophisticated ways to make purchases. Indeed, accessibility was, and still is, the crucial factor in the location of retail activities, and in marketplaces and along major thoroughfares accessibility was optimal. After all, when settlements grew from a core site – the market or crossroads – to a much larger size, that core retained its accessibility and locational advantages. Despite differences in the definition of retailing and the methods used, the maps of Paris, Antwerp and Amsterdam presented in this volume all clearly demonstrate that location patterns in the period under study had a remarkably high degree of continuity. For centuries the old centres of these cities remained the most important locations for shops and other retail facilities. The maps also show that with the growing size of these cities, arterial streets to and from the city centres became important shopping streets as well.

But not everything remained the same. Along with the demographic and spatial growth of cities came the need for more marketplaces. These were also attractive locations for shopkeepers and other retailers, as were main streets and major intersections in the newly developed districts and, in fact, all places where the structure of the urban grid and the concentration of activities and public institutions generated a busy flow of traffic. The growth of cities also created a spatial differentiation between the various branches of the retailing industry. In small towns both the providers of daily necessities and those of less frequently purchased and more durable (luxury) goods could be found in the centre. When cities increased in size, however, this was to change. Being easily accessible, the town centre and the busy arterial roads increasingly became the domain of retailers in durable and luxury goods. Due to the infrequent purchase of such goods they had to attract customers from across the city and even from out of town. They were willing to pay a considerable price for a central location and they thus drove retailers in daily necessities out to the side and back streets and to locations outside the centre. These traders in everyday goods could flourish there as well, however, because they usually catered for an established customer base in the immediate vicinity of the shop and were therefore not dependent on an expensive location on one of the busy streets or squares. As cities grew larger, retailers in consumer durables also moved to locations outside the centre, but due to the nature of their merchandise, there too they showed a clear preference for easily accessible locations. Nevertheless, in the English, French, German, Belgian and Dutch cities that are studied in this book, the centre remained the shopping heart of the city throughout the early modern period and nineteenth century.

Besides spatial differentiation between the providers of daily necessities and consumer durables, in large early modern cities like London, Paris, Amsterdam and Antwerp, a further differentiation occurred due to the uneven distribution of income groups within the city. In the affluent parts of the city the goods on offer were of a very different quality and price than in the less affluent and poor districts. As Natacha Coquery demonstrates in her chapter, the retail landscape of Paris, with its sharp contrast between the rich shops on rue Saint-Honoré in the wealthy northwest of the city and the shops in the less affluent southeast of the city, is a case in point. Exactly at what point in time this form of social differentiation within the retail landscape arose varied from city to city, but it is clear that the size of the city, the policies of local governments and private initiative all played important roles. Those factors were also crucial in a phenomenon which is referred to in several of the contributions below: urban improvement – that is, the adaptation of public space for social and cultural activities, particularly those of the wealthy.

Of the cities discussed in this volume, Amsterdam was the earliest and most striking example of large-scale government intervention in the urban landscape. More than a century before the well-known urban renaissance in English provincial towns, in Amsterdam the adaptation of public space to the needs of the wealthy was part of a larger project: the creation of an orderly, efficient and attractive urban space. The need for intervention arose when Amsterdam entered a period of rapid economic and demographic growth from the end of the sixteenth century. In the city extensions developed in the seventeenth century, welfare groups were deliberately housed in separate quarters and economic activities were also assigned specific areas of the city. In addition, the city government took care of street lighting, paving, waste disposal and the control of traffic flows and it also relocated a number of markets to the urban periphery. This package of measures resulted in a city which was not only pleasant for the rich to live in, but also where, by early modern standards, the shopping district in the centre was clean, comfortable and safe.

From the second half of the eighteenth century, similar initiatives towards urban improvement were taken up in almost all cities and countries discussed in this book. Sometimes the changes were very limited, as Jon Stobart shows for Birmingham, where in the 1790s only a few street lights were installed, and in Besançon, which even in 1830 still had all the characteristics of an early modern city. Even in Paris in the second half of the eighteenth century sewers and pavements were missing in large parts of the city, and traffic was a constant threat to pedestrians. Hence, as Marie Gillet argues in her chapter, the introduction of a new element in the Parisian retail landscape: covered arcades. These were clean, well lit and free from traffic, and therefore provided an ideal setting for undisturbed shopping and strolling. The first arcade, the Passage Feydeau, was built in 1790–91 but was not without its precursors. The designers found inspiration in the famous galleries at the Palais-Royal in Paris, a commercial project developed by the Duke of Orleans and realised in the 1780s. Even older precursors were the shopping arcades in the exchanges of Antwerp, London and Amsterdam built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the Antwerp ‘panden’ dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Because these early forerunners of the Parisian arcades often lost their attractiveness and function long before the end of the eighteenth century, they have largely disappeared from the collective memory and are unfortunately seldom included in the canonical history of retailing.

Covered arcades were copied in a series of European cities: London, Brussels, Milan, Hamburg, Moscow, The Hague and elsewhere. In Paris itself some 30 arcades were built between 1790 and 1840, but their popularity really took off from the 1830s. Many factors can be held responsible for the decline of the Parisian arcades, and the initiatives to improve the quality of the public domain certainly contributed. It was in the time of Haussmann that this manifestation of urban improvement reached its greatest extent and with a heavy hand the urban landscape was adapted to what was seen as the demands of modern times. From that moment, many Parisians and tourists preferred walking on the wide, tree-lined boulevards to strolling along the arcades and the ‘new’ Paris of Haussmann became a desirable model for other cities. Previously it had been London in particular that had set the standards. Here, in the eighteenth century, ‘raised footpaths’ or pavements had already been constructed to protect the shopping and strolling public against dirt, horse manure and traffic on the streets. Brussels and Paris had copied this innovation by the 1780s, but, as in London, pavements were for a long time only to be found in the major streets. In The Hague and Amsterdam the public had to wait until after the middle of the nineteenth century for this innovation. With their private stoops, basement entrances, stairs, fences and other obstacles, the streets of The Hague and Amsterdam preserved their early modern character to a much stronger degree. Obviously, this was not to the satisfaction of the wealthy bourgeoisie, who were perfectly aware of the situation in capitals like London and Paris, and did not hesitate to present these cities as examples to their local authorities.

But sooner or later the changes that can be referred to as urban improvement occurred everywhere. In the important shopping streets especially it was often shopkeepers who took the initiative. Even without being forced by the local authorities, they removed the signs that protruded far into the street, the displays in front of the shop and in the window frames, and the heavy canopies attached to the lower part of the facade. The authorities, in turn, widened streets and filled in canals to facilitate traffic circulation. They also constructed sewers, organised a city sanitation department, ensured adequate street lighting, imposed traffic regulations, regulated markets, and experimented with different paving materials. All this began, of course, in the city centres and the residential quarters of the well-to-do. As a result, shopping and strolling along the streets in the city centres in the second half of the nineteenth century was no longer a perilous undertaking, but a pleasant pastime for those who could afford it.

Those responsible for the design and execution of the extensive public works that were started in the nineteenth century constantly referred to and derived ideas from examples in other cities. Urban landscapes therefore have common elements such as pavements, gutters and street lighting, but nonetheless the variety was great as it was dependent, among other factors, on the scale of urban improvement. In large capitals such as London and Paris, and also in Brussels, slum clearance and improved accessibility resulted in wide boulevards and a relatively open urban landscape. Elsewhere, in English provincial towns and in many German, Belgian and Dutch cities, the early modern street network was less harshly dealt with and the small scale of early modern cities was better preserved (see pictures in the chapters of Ilja Van Damme, Clé Lesger and Jan Hein Furnée). Despite the variety of its manifestations in the cities and countries studied here, urban improvement has led to the disappearance of at least one specific element in the retail landscape: about 1800 shops were removed from bridges.

The impression of unity and diversity remains when we leave the two-dimensional world of location patterns and infrastructure and include the design and appearance of actual shops themselves in our story. The thing that stands out for the early modern period is the huge variety of retail facilities. Firstly, in accordance with the centrality of markets and fairs in retailing, we see the dominance of stalls. But even within that category numerous variants existed. Some stalls were taken down every night and must have been made of canvas with wooden frames; others were semi-permanent or permanent and built in wood or even stone. The more permanent stalls were usually located at busy sites such as bridges and on the facades of important public buildings in the heart of a city. Moreover there were the stalls in the galleries of exchanges, and in Antwerp in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the ‘panden’, precursors of the arcades that were developed in the decades around 1800.

In addition, retailers ran shops from their homes. Virtually all rooms were suitable, but the best suited were those with direct access to the street and the public. This explains the preference of shopkeepers for the front part of houses, and for cellars. The appearance of these fixed outlets varied according to predominant architectural traditions and thus differed from country to country and, within large countries such as France and Germany, from region to region. For the Netherlands and Flanders, the available images indicate a high degree of similarity in house type and method of construction and consequently retail spaces will have looked quite similar too.

What all early modern (and medieval) retail outlets had in common was their open character. For stalls and ‘bulks’ this is self-evident, but the workshops of artisans selling their products directly to consumers and even fixed shops also had at least one open side. In front of a fixed shop often stood a table or counter on which the merchandise was put on display. Shutters and window frames were also used for presenting merchandise and when the facade was equipped with an awning and the merchandise could be exposed to the weather, articles were hung from the awning as well. Finally, there were movable and fixed cupboards placed in front of the shop or mounted onto the facade in which precious objects were protected against the weather, dirt from the street and theft. Both the merchandise that was put on display in the open air and the customers were protected from direct sunlight, rain and dirt by awnings and canopies. These too gave early modern shops the appearance of market stalls.

The open character of shops, and of retail facilities in general, has a long history. Since the Middle Ages, transactions in the privacy of shops and workshops were distrusted. Buying and selling preferably took place in broad daylight and in the public sphere of the marketplace. This way, cheating with shoddy weights and measures was prevented, the customer was offered the opportunity to inspect the quality of the merchandise and the establishment of a fair price was more likely due to the presence of bystanders and other customers. But there was also a very pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations, Maps and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Shopping Streets and Cultures from a Long-Term and Transnational Perspective: An Introduction
• 2 The Shopping Streets of Provincial England, 1650–1840
• 3 Stalls, Bulks, Shops and Long-Term Change in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England
• 4 Shopping Streets in Eighteenth-Century Paris: A Landscape Shaped by Historical, Economic and Social Forces
• 5 Antwerp Goes Shopping!: Continuity and Change in Retail Space and Shopping Interactions from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century
• 6 Urban Planning, Urban Improvement and the Retail Landscape in Amsterdam, 1600–1850
• 7 German Landscapes of Consumption, 1750–1850: Perspectives of German and Foreign Travellers
• 8 Something Old, Something Borrowed, Something New: The Brussels Shopping Townscape, 1830–1914
• 9 Innovation and Tradition in the Shopping Landscape of Paris and a Provincial City, 1800–1900
• 10 ‘Our Living Museum of Nouveautés’: Visual and Social Pleasures in The Hague’s Shopping Streets, 1650–1900
• Select Bibliography
• Index