Cheap Street London’S Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, C.1850–1939
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Victoria Kelley is Director of Research and Professor of the History of Design and Material Culture at the University for the Creative Arts<p>'Throughout, Kelley evokes the vibrancy and spectacle of the street markets. The chapter on ‘Streets’ is a highlight, due no doubt to her expertise in the history of design and material culture. ... These stories do not just stick in the mind. London’s irregular markets were full of delight and stimulation, but at the same time complicated categories and norms of metropolitan society. Kelley lets London’s street markets dazzle us, before making us think again.'<br />Charlie Taverner,<i> Cultural and Social History</i><br /><br />'A well-written and richly illustrated book on London street markets, Victoria Kelley challenges conventional narratives of Victorian street markets as imaginative and material relics of the past.' <br />Judith Walkowitz<i>, </i><i>Victorian Studies</i><br /><br />'Kelley’s hugely entertaining treatment of the market culture of the East End provides an important contribution to the literature surrounding the area and the cultures of poverty and subsistence that underpinned the “informal” economy of the poor ... There is a breadth of scope and an adventurousness of interpretive method here that gives Kelley’s study a refreshingly different take on some traditional themes.' <br />Antony Taylor, <i>Left History</i></p>
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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
London’s street markets – Petticoat Lane, Berwick Street, Lambeth Walk – are iconic locations: Cheap street tells their history, and that of the people who bought and sold there. From the 1850s anything that could be bought in a shop could also be bought in London’s street markets, which were the butcher, baker, greengrocer, provision merchant, haberdasher, tailor and furnisher of the working-class city. They sat uncomfortably on the edge of the law, barely tolerated by authorities that did not quite know whether to admire them for their efficient circulation of goods, or to despise them for their unregulated and ‘low’ character. They were the first recourse of immigrants looking to earn a living, and of privileged observers seeking a voyeuristic glimpse of street life.
London’s street markets have too often been overlooked, viewed as anomalous amongst the sophisticated consumer institutions of the modern city, the department stores and West-End shops. Cheap street shows how the street markets, as an emanation of the informal economy that flourishes in the interstices of urban life, adapted nimbly to urban growth and contributed to consumer modernity. In doing so, they propagated myths about what it meant to live in London and be a Londoner.
Cheap street analyses the street markets through their legal and economic informality, material culture, sensory affects, and performative character, using rich and varied documentary and visual evidence. It reshapes the interpretation of London’s urban geographies and consumer cultures, offering new insights to amateurs, students and scholars of London’s history.
‘Kelley lets London’s street markets dazzle us, before making us think again.'
Cultural and Social History