ABSTRACT
If the mass marketing of the seaside resort was a story that could be told largely in British terms, this will certainly not be true of any other type of place we will examine. The residential suburb, arguably, was an English invention of the early nineteenth century. By the 1840s it was clearly visible not only in London but also in the emergent industrial cities, such as Manchester or Birmingham. Yet for many decades, the enjoyment of suburban living in Britain’s growing cities remained the prerogative of social elites. In a way that closely paralleled the story of the resorts, suburban ‘marketing’, such as it was, was conducted through the informal processes of fashion, envy and emulation within the widening urban elite. The very possibility of suburban living for the masses remained remote until the end of the nineteenth century. The reality of mass suburbia only appeared between the two world wars. Organized, formal, procedures to sell these suburbs therefore only emerged over this same timescale.
