In reality, it was impossible to draw a sharp line between modern and traditional shopping. Aristide Boucicant, the founder of the Bon Marché, had started out as a pedlar’s associate. Haussmann’s bulldozing of old Paris – boulevards instead of barricades – set the stage for the big stores, but it was quite unique. Even in Cairo, which tried to follow his example most faithfully, small shops and street traders continued to find their niche in the new downtown area of Ismailia. The boulevards were dominated by grand stores selling Western clothes, but the tiny passageways connecting them were home to hundreds of tailors, trinket sellers and food shops selling nuts and spices in open sacks. On Fu’ad Street, unlicensed hawkers continued to peddle their wares. Most locals moved between these spaces unbothered by an academic divide between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. They went to the department store for special occasions, bought their regular Western shoes from one of the cheap small cobblers, and tried some sweets from Damascus on the way. They were, in short, parallel shoppers.94
It is tempting to see in the global spread of the department store a sign of its advancing dominance, but that is an optical illusion. The world of shopping was expanding in all directions in the late nineteenth century. The big stores rang up sales, but so did a host of rivals, from pedlars to the co-operative shop. In Western Europe in 1914, department stores controlled less than 3 per cent of the retail trade; in the United States, it was slightly more.95 The stores rarely reached 10 per cent of all clothes and furniture sold. Their competitors were not asleep. Small shops multiplied. By 1910, for example, there were 21,000 shops in Hamburg, one for every 44 inhabitants, double the density half a century earlier. Across Europe, family-run shops provided employment for millions, especially women. And their swelling ranks explain both their paranoia about new competitors and their drive to innovate in the hunt for customers. Small shops led the way in advertising, packaging and display, and put colonial and processed goods on the shelf.96
Urban growth, a mobile workforce and a rising standard of living created opportunities for pedlars as well. Far from being the dying remnants of the Middle Ages, itinerant traders adapted remarkably well to the flexible needs of the city. Since many hawkers could or would not sign their name, British census data is unreliable, but experts estimate their urban number probably doubled in the second half of the nineteenth century, to around 70,000, in line with population growth. In Prussia, their number was twice that high, in spite of various taxes and restrictions.97 In Hamburg, around 3,000 costermongers sold everything from fruit and vegetables to pulp fiction. In town and country alike, pedlars increasingly carried mass-manufactured goods rather than home-made baskets and crockery. The abolition of guilds and greater freedom of trade earlier in the century also opened the door for discounters, the Wanderlager, a kind of mobile outlet centre that, in premises rented for a few weeks at a time, brought remainders, cheap clothes, delicatessen foods and carpets from bankruptcy sales to small-town consumers. In 1910, there were a thousand of these in Germany.98
The radical alternative to the department store was the co-operative shop (see Plate 21). Like the big stores, co-operatives sought to lower prices by eliminating the middleman, but they went one step further, turning the shop into a mutual enterprise, owned by the shoppers themselves. Profits were handed back as a dividend: the ‘divi’. In England, some friendly societies began to sell food for mutual benefit in the 1760s; in Japan, co-operative finance was already practised by the Mujin societies in the thirteenth century. The real take-off came after 1844 when a group of flannel weavers and Owenite socialists opened a co-operative store in Rochdale, Lancashire. The ‘Rochdale Pioneers’ became stars of international radicalism, attracting admirers from as far away as Russia and Japan. It was Rochdale’s moment on the world stage. When the failure of the 1848 revolutions left behind a suspicion of the ‘wilder sort’ of social reformers, as the leading cooperator George Jacob Holyoake would call them, the co-operatives seemed the acceptable face of social improvement.99 Instead of violent overthrow, co-operatives sought to tame the merciless, capitalist beast from within by growing virtuous cells of voluntarism, mutualism and self-help. Signing up promised a better world as well as cheaper food.
The export success of this model depended on what domestic alternatives were available and, in particular, on the size and attitude of local socialist parties. In Denmark, for example, the Social Democrats believed that co-operatives would worsen, not improve, the condition of the people by pushing small shopkeepers into destitution. In late-nineteenth-century Britain, by contrast, in the absence of a strong Labour Party, it grew into the biggest social movement of the day. By 1910, some 3 million Britons belonged to 1,400 consumer co-operatives – or roughly every fourth household, and most working-class families. Co-ops were particularly strong in the mid-sized towns of the industrial north-west, previous retail deserts. On the eve of the First World War, they controlled 8 per cent of all retail sales in Britain, three times that of the department stores and just ahead of the chain stores. In Germany, they counted 1.6 million members; in France a million; and half a million in Italy, concentrated in the north; in Japan they took off in the inter-war years. Peasants joined in Scandinavian countries.
Basic foodstuffs made up the bulk of their wares; in the Belgian La Maison du Peuple half the sales were of bread. But the co-ops were extending their range, too. They developed their own brands and advertising. Stores began to sell jewellery and furniture, and to decorate their shop windows. ‘Basic needs’ were expanding. The co-ops sought to overcome cultural as much as material poverty. To create a more cultivated self and community-oriented lifestyle required nothing less than a revolution in taste and leisure. They offered a working-class version of total shopping with a good conscience. Like the department stores, local co-ops put on concerts, tea parties and cooking lessons. They opened libraries and reading rooms. Exhibitions displayed a world of goods in miniature, except that they were not the latest fashions from Paris but wholesome flour, boots and cutlery made by partners in the International Co-operative Alliance, founded in 1893.100
To see the rise of shopping as the decline of public space would, therefore, be too simple. Shopping created new public spaces, sociability and sensibilities as well as cutting into old ones. Cities were battle zones between rival visions of spatial order. More than anyone, it was street sellers who were in the firing line, and their fate shows us both how urban authorities tried to regulate the flow of goods and people, and how difficult that proved to be. For a start, the sanitary revolution spread to the street. Hawkers were considered carriers of disease and disorder, difficult to check, easily slipping away. Standing at street corners, moving and stopping their carts, shouting out their wares, they were an eyesore to every self-respecting mayor and health inspector. Across the world, cities turned to market halls to bring them under central control (see Plate 22). Such halls offered additional stalls for teeming urban populations. They made it easier to license retailers and control quality and prices. And they promised to regulate people and behaviour. Prohibition of street selling, sanitary reforms and the erection of a market hall often went hand in hand. Bolton’s grand market hall, over an acre in size, required the clearance of almost two thousand slum dwellings. Roughs and undesirables would be kept out. Inside, spitting, swearing and shouting were forbidden. Market halls showed what a city was made of. Bradford’s Kirkgate Market was an octagonal pavilion with a glass-and-iron roof and ornamental ironwork painted in gold and bronze. The opening of Derby’s market hall in 1866 involved a grand procession of the town’s worthies and a performance of the Messiah by a chorus 600-strong.101 For their champions, these halls were veritable schools of progress. They taught the lower orders better manners and gave them cheaper and healthier food, thanks to bulk purchases, freezers, hygienic storage and health inspections.
Transforming shopping spaces and habits proved more complicated than reformers had reckoned, however. In Berlin, the market ha
lls were booming with wholesalers of food and flowers, but small retailers deserted them. By 1911, observers began to notice their ‘growing insignificance’ for ordinary people.102 Several halls closed down. It could be cheaper to buy from a street dealer, who did not carry the extra expense of renting a stall. Moreover, small stores offered credit while market halls dealt in cash only. Many halls lacked the splendour of Bradford’s. Shanghai had fourteen municipal markets, for example. Elgin Road market was ‘an old wooden erection’ propped up by supports. Purdon Road market was a cement structure, but only half the space on the first floor was occupied. Wuchow market was ‘difficult to keep clean’ because of the many dealers of cooked food. Behind the town hall, in Maloo market, the Chinese section was doing well, but the foreign section was deserted. In Tsitsihar Road, market stalls were empty while hawkers thrived. If cities involve what Henri Lefebvre, a pioneer in the study of everyday life, has called the production of ‘spatial consensus’,103 the authorities in Shanghai had few illusions that they were achieving it. ‘The enormous number of foodhawkers in the Settlement is a constant source of anxiety, and even with the assistance of Sanitary Police it is found impossible . . . to control this class of trade.’ They stored food in their bedrooms or used as ‘a refrigerant . . . the commodity known as natural ice, but more accurately described as frozen sewage’.104
The simple fact was that street sellers offered cheap and flexible shopping. The minute a fixed store pulled down its shutters, a street seller arrived at the corner. And they were everywhere. Buying some food in a market hall often meant a long walk or the extra expense of a tram fare. Centralization had visible limits, often ignored in portrayals of the modern city in terms of boulevards and department stores. Push carts and street stalls remained common sights on New York’s Lower East Side and in other cities with mobile, migrant communities. Weekly markets continued to flourish in Cologne, just as they survived in Quito and São Paulo.105 Even in Britain, cities were pushed to reverse their earlier regulations because market halls proved incapable of catering to growing populations with more money to spend. Around the turn of the twentieth century, after two generations of abuse and fines, street sellers and open-air markets were allowed back.106
Nor were street sellers easily pushed around. The provincial Mexican city of Morelia provides a good example of the twisted history of spatial politics. Modernity here arrived in 1888, with electric lighting. A department store opened – the Port of Liverpool. Merchants and city officials joined forces to clean up public spaces and create an attractive shopping environment. Stores introduced glass display cases. But this sparkling new setting was rudely disrupted by street vendors, who added injury to insult by taking away custom, according to a 1913 commission. Instead of entering respectable stores, customers would linger outside, where street stalls sold everything from shoes to ice cream. Kiosks, too, sprang up. The vendors had to go. The order to relocate, however, had unexpected consequences. Instead of packing up and dispersing, one by one, vendors united and formed a union. In 1917, during the revolution, they returned.107
We have stressed the contribution of old and new to the consuming city. It was a story of diversification rather than homogenization. Let us now move from the spaces to the rhythms of shopping. Many writers have claimed that, in the modern city, movement became regulated, disciplined and anonymized. Numbed customers trotted along boulevards and moved through department stores in an orchestrated flow. Lefebvre likened modernity to ‘dressage’, where, like horses, people are trained in a sequence of automatic, repetitive movements. Liberty is an illusion: ‘people can turn right or left, but their walk, the rhythm of their walking . . . do not change for all that.’108 We might object that routines can be liberating as well as disempowering,109 but here we ask whether modern urban life was in fact a heartless, monotonous cycle.
In fact, the modern city impressed many contemporaries with its multiple rhythms. The journalist George Sims took the pulse of the British metropolis in 1904 in a panoramic tour of Living London. He observed how shopping districts differed ‘not only in their general appearance, but in their methods, their manner and their language as though they belonged to different cities’. The scene in Westbourne Grove, home of Whiteley’s department store, where ladies chatted about ‘prices, bargains, catalogues, and such things’ was a far cry from that in the East End, where enterprising shopkeepers hawked furniture and crockery ‘amidst clustered pillars of linoleum and carpet, like lay priests in ruined temples’ and ‘buyers are stopping to haggle with the sellers.’ On Saturday evenings, tailors and toyshops on Whitechapel Road had their doors open and costermongers’ barrows stood ‘thickly by the kerb’. Here the ‘baked potato merchant passes and repasses, sowing sparks from the big black can on his barrow. The public houses are full; the pavement is covered with men and women and children, well-dressed, shabby and disreputable, shopping, or leisurely promenading.’ When the audiences poured out of the theatres, the current changed again.110
New spaces such as the market hall, too, remained home to a range of rhythms. On weekdays, there was the flow of customers in search of a good cut of meat, or a gramophone. No spitting, please. On Saturdays, however, many markets stayed open until midnight. For youths, they were a place to promenade and flirt. Others stopped to watch clog dancers or to be weighed. Haggling returned. Tea rooms offered a place for rest and refreshment. For those in a hurry, there was fast food from one of the pie shops or ice-cream vendors. Jugglers, acrobats and other street performers were allowed back in; Glasgow’s Bazaar had a rifle range.111 Except for the absence of second-hand shops, it was not so different from Tianqiao market.
ENTERTAINING SPACES
Space, as Lefebvre points out, is not just there, a physical assemblage of streets and buildings. It is social, the product of communication, practices and exchange.112 It involves the senses, a perception of one’s personal space in relation to the surrounding world. In the modern city, that sense of space underwent a transformation as remarkable as the physical changes brought about by water pipes and glass windows. Entertainment was crucial to that change. In addition to goods and people, cities were channelling emotion. To be sure, cities remained spaces of work, and they had offered bread and circuses since ancient times. All the same, the period roughly from the 1880s to the 1920s witnessed a dramatic proliferation of commercial spaces dedicated to fun – the music hall, the cinema the amusement park, the football stadium and the velodrome. Their holidays and spending money may look miserly to today’s reader, but most working people of the period were enjoying more disposable income and holiday time than ever before. Some towns made pleasure their primary business. The English resort Blackpool entertained 4 million visitors in 1893. Many factory workers enjoyed their first ‘day-tripping’ holiday here; Sigmund Freud, too, stayed twice and loved paddling in the Irish Sea.
Ambivalence about the city ran deep in European culture. The Romantic William Wordsworth warned in 1800 that its many stimulations induced an ‘almost savage stupor’. A century later, such diagnoses were reinforced by new experiences of time and space. Instead of ticking like a clock, time moved like a stream, ebbing and swelling. Modernist writers stretched minutes and compressed years, even reversed the flow of time.113 There was a widespread feeling that society was accelerating and fragmenting under the strain. Individuals were being tossed about, cut loose from stabilizing norms and hierarchies.114 Speed and dynamism made the city the crucible of a new mental state, what Georg Simmel in 1903 called the ‘blasé attitude’ in what remains the most influential essay on the metropolis: ‘The blasé attitude results . . . from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves.’ In the big city, two forces were at work. One was the ‘boundless pursuit of pleasure’ which ‘agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all’. The second was the bombardment of the mind with so many sensations that, however small and harmless i
n themselves, their sheer number exhausted the nerves. The result was an inability ‘to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy. This constitutes the blasé attitude which, in fact, every metropolitan child shows when compared with children of quieter and less changeable milieus.’ It was characterized by numbness and a loss of depth. The city was all head, no heart. City dwellers acquired the soulless intellect of a calculating machine, responding to the metropolitan pressure for punctuality, precision and coordination. Ultimately, metropolitan people were a lonely crowd of pseudo-individuals. To the ‘blasé person’, Simmel concluded, all things appeared in ‘an evenly flat and gray tone’.115
Cinema, with its fast-moving images, came to epitomize metropolitan overstimulation, exhaustion and homogenization. ‘Movies are the mirror of today’s society,’ wrote Siegfried Kracauer in a 1927 newspaper article on cinema audiences for the Frankfurter Zeitung, where he was film and theatre critic. ‘Stupid and unreal film fantasies are the day dreams of society.’ They forged a ‘mass taste’, typical of the metropolis. Everything about cinema was fake, from the escapist romances of poor girls marrying rich men to the architecture itself; the baroque pretence of Berlin’s Gloria-Palast typified the ‘refined pomp of superficiality’. In small towns, cinemas were for the lower classes, while the middle classes kept their distance. In Berlin, by contrast, the current of metropolitan life sucked everyone into mass society, including the rich and educated. The result was a ‘homogenous metropolitan public . . . from the diva to the typist.’ Kracauer had little doubt who epitomized this metropolitan mass: his series bore the title ‘The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies’.116
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