Regional space can usefully be viewed in Lefebvrian terms. Wider integration of the region took place through a variety of media, including transport networks and services, customer and supply networks, urban institutions and personal contacts. Transport shaped the region as a space of production through facilitating spatial divisions of labour and linking local production to distant markets. The consumption space of the region was therefore produced not only by retailing hierarchies, but also through the actions, preferences and perceptions of individual consumers. Regional spatial–economic relationships were therefore just as important as local socio-cultural forces in shaping consumption and material culture in eighteenth-century England. Communication lines fed into larger centres from smaller towns and were focused on the pre-eminent towns in each region: Chester, Manchester and Liverpool in the north-west, and Birmingham and Worcester in the west Midlands.