At the Heart of the City: The Battle for British Marketplaces, c. 1925-1979

Abstract

At the Heart of the City examines how small-scale retail adapted to economic globalization in twentieth-century Britain. More specifically, I argue that during a long mid-century (the 1920s through the 1970s) characterized by bouts of economic decline and stretches of modernist urban renewal, the salience of the town or city-center market helped a variety of historical actors rearticulate how publicly managed retailing spaces served a contemporary social good. A history of economic life and urban development told from the provincial margins, At the Heart of the City draws from over ten local archives in England, Scotland, and Wales to reassemble how shoppers, sellers, planners, and politicians defended localism as a form of everyday commercial citizenship and belonging in modern Britain. The first section examines how retailing communities at the market were forged along class and ethno-national lines during the interwar depression and the wartime economy of rationing and austerity. Using the market trade journal The World’s Fair, local market archives from cities such as Glasgow and Leeds, inter-war life writing, the novels and films of J.B. Priestley, and Board of Trade records from Second World War, I argue that markets were at once expansive in their economic ethos of “fairness,” yet increasingly bound in their ethno-national terms of social inclusion. The second section considers the market’s malleable and polyvalent role in the British built environment, concentrating primarily on the postwar period. Attending to the way in which modernist planner-architects such as Frederick Gibberd in Harlow New Town or Konrad Smigielski in historic Leicester conceptualized the purpose of the retail market in urban space, this section also considers the economic realities of “planning for affluence” in rebuilt and newly built towns and cities. Questioning the wholesale application of Americanized retailing and the primacy of property development, markets traders—along with select small business associations and local government committees—advocated for the commercial value of traditional, low-cost market squares and market halls. This section argues that the continuing relevance of retail markets in postwar Britain accentuated the unevenness of affluence and consumerism in provincial towns and cities. The final section concentrates on the 1970s as a period of divergence for the market’s ownership and purpose. One development was the rise of private markets held on rural and semi-industrial spaces of towns and cities, beyond the control of local authorities. A second trend was the push for market preservation, with heritage activists petitioning for the protection of market places and Victorian market halls in struggling industrial towns and cities such as Bradford and Chesterfield. This final section argues that these were two products of the same political conjuncture. As Labour-backed planning and redevelopment lost favor, economic populism and local heritage emerged as alternatives. The debate over retail markets thus serves as a heuristic tool for understanding the roots of two paradoxical tenets of neoliberal Thatcherism: the iconoclasm of enterprise culture and the reverence for a “shared” British past. As questions about the value of small-scale economies continue preoccupy twenty-first century planners, citizens, politicians, and developers, At the Heart of the City makes the case for historicizing how certain commercial institutions and urban spaces came to be the protected purview of a tangible, local “public” rather than an abstract, globalized “market” over the twentieth century.