ABSTRACT
In 1751 ‘A large square at the Cross opposite the Town House, [was] ordered to be pavemented for the gentlemen to walk on by way of exchange’. This square, called the Plainstanes, long continued to be ‘the place where merchants most did congregate [in Aberdeen]’. The marketplace has long associations with women as sellers of foodstuffs at markets, but here men expropriated the term. This chapter looks at how urban space was perceived and utilized in medium-sized eighteenth-century commercial towns. Relying largely on research on Aberdeen (Scotland) and Odense (Denmark), it provides a snapshot of the late eighteenth century, looking at the context of urban development, the ways in which towns and townscapes changed and how activities within the urban economy shifted. Specifically, it explores the gendered context and the ways that the idea of the town and constructions of gender functioned within the urban terrain. It addresses the organization and gendering of commercial spaces and examines whether the physical spaces of the town were gendered in the context of this workforce. Of specific interest is the physical space of the homes and the workshops that people lived in and used as their bases of operations.
