Conclusions

Consumption lay at the geographical and ideological heart of the provincial town. In presenting an integrated analysis of leisure and shopping in eighteenth-century England, we have argued that they drew on related social and cultural imperatives, were intermeshed in the daily lives of consumers, and were set within and drew upon overlapping spaces of consumption. Central to our argument is an understanding that the practices of leisure and shopping produced and reproduced consumer space, whilst they were themselves moulded by those spaces. The playing out of this socio-spatial dialectic has been a continual theme; but we have also sought to reconsider this simple dichotomy, drawing on Lefebvre’s trialectic of spatiality – (everyday) spaces, (preconceived) representations of space, and (perceived or felt) spaces of representation – to uncover the complex spatialities of consumption in eighteenth-century towns. ¹ In doing so, the objective was not to present a critique of spatial theory. Rather, we sought to draw on these ideas to further our understanding of the character and development of consumption during this critical period, often characterised as being the birth of a consumer society. To this end, we consciously linked this spatialisation of urban history to contemporary discourses – of politeness, modernity and sociability – and to the subjectivity and identity of consumers – through notions of performance, representation and display. ² Exploring the spatiality of consumption at various scales both embeds practices in a layering of space and highlights the ways in which different imperatives surfaced at each scale.