ABSTRACT
Place of Work ‘And all the stays taken out that were within reach, and then the shutter was put up again’:4 Urbanization and Retailing
Much has been said lately about the gathering pace of urbanization and the changing function of urban space over the eighteenth century. Schwarz has dem-
onstrated that the metropolis of London was greatly a ected by urbanization over the course of the eighteenth century, but perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the outlying regions, what he refers to as ‘the greater metropolitan region’, were a ected in the same way. London was never contained within the walls of the City itself, but was a conglomeration of neighbourhoods which did not fall under the legal denition of the city of ‘London’ until 1888 when the London County Council was created. Prior to that, Londoners’ own denition of their city depended on the business in which they were involved, or where they lived. As Schwarz says, ‘to sailors London meant the riverside, to silkweavers Spitalelds, to drovers Smitheld’.5 Urbanization did not stop with London, however, as Jon Stobart and Neil Raven have argued, but was felt in towns all over the country,6 partly because of the rise of the middling sorts and the emergence of polite society. Towns which had risen to prominence through industrialization were not seen as rened places in which to live, nor to visit, if one were from polite society. e eighteenth century saw a growing interest in leisure and consumption, which was at odds with industrialized towns. us, seaside and country towns played a stronger role in urbanization than has hitherto been thought to be the case.7 e urbanization of London bore a direct connection to that of the towns of which Stobart and Raven have spoken.
