ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which shops promoted themselves and the consumer spaces of the town outside their immediate physical sphere, with special regard to newspaper advertisements placed by provincial shopkeepers. It explores how advertisements conveyed images of modern consumer spaces in the town through the development of ‘advertising spaces’, which projected ideas of consumerism into the public sphere in new ways. The chapter focuses on the cultural setting of shopping practices, shopkeepers’ selling strategies, and the spatiality of consumer processes. Sign and symbol, from shop signs to trade tokens, were longstanding tools for the shopkeeper to promote business. In the second half of the eighteenth century, shopkeepers of the city of Coventry and to a much lesser extent Warwick, Atherstone, Birmingham and further afield, such as Leicester and Stony Stratford, placed a huge variety of advertisements in the Warwickshire newspapers. Advertisements sat at a powerful intersection between the town and its visitors and the shop and its customers.
