Cheap Street

London's street markets and the cultures of informality, c.1850–1939

Victoria Kelley

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781526131713
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

Cheap street is a lively and scholarly account of London's street markets, which were an overlooked site of urban modernity and the most vigorous outgrowth of the informal economy that flourished below and beyond the recognised institutions of the consumer city. Kelley brings together design and material culture history, urban studies and social and cultural history to analyse the street markets' distinct characteristics. These included the flaring naked flames of their naphtha lights, their impermanent yet persistent unofficial occupation of space, and the noisy performative selling that took place there. The result is a new interpretation of London's urban geographies, moving beyond the accepted view of the West End as the consumer city and the East as the city of poverty, and demonstrating that the informality of the street markets was a powerful force in shaping representations of London and its people.

1

What is a street market?

What is a street market? And how did London come to have a growing number of them from the mid-nineteenth century onwards? The answer to the first question at least might seem obvious, but in fact this issue requires some consideration in the context of a broader, complex history of market provision and retail development in London and beyond. The report of the Royal Commission on Market Rights and Tolls (1888–91) defined a market as ‘an authorised public concourse of buyers and sellers of commodities, meeting at a place, more or less strictly limited or defined, at an appointed time’.¹ This is a neat definition – people buying, people selling, commodities, a set place and a set time; together these constitute a market. The Royal Commission (which examined the whole of Great Britain and Ireland) identified in London thirteen markets, including Smithfield, Billingsgate, Spitalfields, Borough Market, Leadenhall and Covent Garden. But as we have already seen in the Introduction, Henry Mayhew had counted 37 markets in 1851, and London County Council was to find 112 when it studied the issue in 1893. Why then did the Royal Commission in 1888 list just thirteen markets?

The Commission’s definition of a market contains one more term, apart from buyers, sellers, commodities, place and time, and that is the word ‘authorised’. In the Commission’s view, a market was only a market if it had some sort of legal sanction or basis, a market charter or a grant of market rights. It is this part of the definition that led the Royal Commission to restrict its efforts, in London, to the investigation of certain markets only – those such as Smithfield or Billingsgate which had emerged from the medieval period onwards, founded upon royal or parliamentary grant or charter, and which all had long histories in the provisioning of London.² The reason why the Royal Commission reached such a different figure for the number of markets from Henry Mayhew and London County Council was that it was counting different markets, and did not include the street markets in its tally.

In contrast to the formal (or ‘authorised’) markets, street markets are usually referred to as ‘unauthorised’ by nineteenth-century commentators, although I prefer the more straightforward term ‘street market’, which was also used commonly (as indeed was ‘informal’).³ ‘Street market’ is descriptively accurate: with just one exception (Whitechapel Hay Market), by the mid-nineteenth century the authorised markets were all housed in off-street premises, while almost without exception, the unauthorised markets took place on the street. In its thirteen volumes the Royal Commission devoted just a few pages and a few scattered references to London’s street or unauthorised markets, and when it did consider them, it was only to question their traders in their role as customers of the authorised markets, costermongers who bought their stock in Billingsgate, Covent Garden or Spitalfields and sold it in the street markets. Many other contemporary accounts of London’s markets commence with the proviso that their authors will only describe the authorised markets, and are not interested in the street markets.⁴ Sidney Webb, in a Fabian tract of 1891, dismissed them as ‘a few insignificant so-called “street markets”’.⁵ Trade directories did not list market stalls: using just Kelly’s Directory as a source, and looking at Middlesex Street in Whitechapel as an example, the historian could form the wholly erroneous view that the businesses operating in this street were limited to the shops listed. In fact Middlesex Street, under the customary name ‘Petticoat Lane’, was famous for its huge street market, emerging by the early twentieth century as one of the sights of London.⁶

The fact that so many observers felt able to overlook or dismiss the street markets, which were nevertheless widespread, quantitatively significant and spectacular, says something about the status of the informal economy during the period of this study. One of the problems of applying the idea of informality to historical subject matter is to show that a concept originating in the recent and contemporary developing world, and then applied to developed post-industrial economies, is also applicable in earlier periods. One simple route to demonstrate this relevance might be to draw a parallel between London’s nineteenth-century street markets and the communities in which they developed, and non-Western socio-economic practices. There are hints of precedents here: Keith Hart, in looking at Accra, was influenced by the ‘proto-ethnography’ of Henry Mayhew’s description of nineteenth-century London’s poor street sellers, while Gareth Stedman Jones, in Outcast London (a study of the ‘casual labour problem’ from the 1860s to 1914), notes how his thinking was influenced by ‘the economics and politics of development … I had acquired a vivid sense of the shantytowns of the Third World from reading Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss.’⁷

Thomas Buchner and Philip Hoffmann-Rehnitz’s volume on the ‘shadow economy and irregular work’ goes some way to addressing the gap in historical studies of the informal economy, and provides a rather more sophisticated means of applying the idea of informality historically than simple East End/shanty town parallels.⁸ Buchner and Hoffmann-Rehnitz place the history of informality – defined in the broadest terms – firmly into Western economic history, noting that it has been an overlooked feature of many economies and can be viewed alongside its more regulated and recognised counterpart in the formal economy as ‘two dimensions of one comprehensive economic (capitalistic) order with emphasis on the interrelations between them’.⁹ Buchner and Hoffmann-Rehnitz provide a brief periodisation that fits informality into historical changes in economic organisation: it was strongly present in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period in which guild organisation was at its tightest (proving the point made by many commentators that informality cannot exist without formality, and vice versa). From the early nineteenth century the growth of free trade economic policy might have been expected to erode informality (for the same reason), but in fact it persisted, and was reinforced late in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth by the emergence of a growing concept of formality in waged labour as the norm.¹⁰ Although the British economy and legal frameworks developed on a slightly different trajectory to those European countries that provide the evidence drawn upon by Buchner and Hoffmann-Rehnitz, the fact that the Royal Commission and other sources failed to recognise the London street markets already begins to suggest that, for a variety of reasons, they were viewed not just as unauthorised, but also illegitimate. For the purposes of historical analysis it makes sense to think about them as informal.

It is a peculiarity of researching this particular historical subject that while some observers treat us to vivid descriptions of the street markets that stress their size, spectacular nature, auditory impact and the assault they made on all the other senses, other sources barely seem to see them at all, because they did not fit into accepted categories of economic activity. Understanding the street markets’ informality is crucial not just to knowing their character and how they functioned, but also to handling some sorts of evidence which may be predisposed not to recognise them, or to describe them in certain ways: as Buchner and Hoffmann-Rehnitz have noted, accounts of irregular or informal economic activities often show ‘a specific bias’ towards a critical stance.¹¹ This chapter will examine the street markets through their informality, in their relationship to the law and its attempts, unsuccessful and successful, first to capture or to ‘see’ their activities, and secondly to regulate them. Almost any historical phenomenon is influenced by the legislative frameworks that surround it, but in the case of the London street markets that context is particularly important because they were formed in a position of uncertainty and insecurity, balanced on the precarious boundary between laissez faire policies and urban regulation, and it was in this context that they responded to both economic and social change. This chapter sets out a chronology of how the street markets developed and grew, establishing a story that will then be embellished thematically in the chapters to come, exploring aspects of the street markets’ character over the period between the mid-nineteenth century and the Second World War.

1850s–1860s: a gap in the market

If there were established and formally constituted authorised markets in London, how and why did growing numbers of unauthorised street markets appear? Was there a gap in the formal economy that the informal street markets were able to fill? One way to answer this question is to contrast what happened in London with the development of markets elsewhere in the country. According to James Schmiechen and Kenneth Carls in their history of the British market hall:

The market hall was an original but not surprising invention that by the second half of the nineteenth century had become arguably the most important public building in the British townscape and one that continued to evolve well into the twentieth century. It stands as an outstanding example of nineteenth-century municipal social policy and urban planning, and in it lay the embryo of the modern environmentally controlled retail spaces: the department store, the supermarket, and the shopping mall.¹²

Schmiechen and Carls depict a clear evolution of retail practices from open markets to market halls, supermarkets and malls, an evolution that is similar in principle to those model...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 What is a street market?
• 2 Things
• 3 Streets
• 4 People
• 5 Street markets, informality and the performance of London
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index