ABSTRACT
The representation of the English city-for example, in commercial advertising-as a slick, modern ‘consumer paradise’ is the preferred vision of those with a professional interest in it. It is also characteristic of a certain section of the academy, especially in cultural studies, involved in a kind of idealist and celebratory interpretation of consumer culture. We want to argue that its empirical reference is sometimes more problematic, especially in the North of England. One of the more obvious effects of this kind of representation is the suppression of the widespread evidence of poverty and destitution in the city and the way in which this poverty structures the practice of shopping for a large (and perhaps an increasing) proportion of the urban population. We are also aware that this kind of ideological representation of the city may bear only a partial and indirect relation to overall patterns of use of that city across the social formation as a whole, not just amongst the poor. In that sense, such representations miss the specifics of how people shop in individual cities; and of how the local knowledge which different publics develop, whilst shopping, relates to their local ‘sense of place’ and, perhaps, also to what we are calling the ‘local structure of feeling’ of particular cities and city regions.
