Even in times of peace, food is never far removed from violence. Both are part of our animal natures, and when live beasts are present in the city, the relationship becomes explicit. The slaughter of animals in London remained unregulated until the surprisingly late date of 1848, by which time there were over 100 slaughterhouses in the Smithfield area alone, many of them in the ordinary basements of houses and butcher’s shops. The so-called ‘shambles’ were horrific places by all accounts, where the cattle were ‘killed and flayed in dark, confined and filthy cellars’.38 The streets above were little better, to judge from one contemporary account: ‘Through the filthy lanes and alleys no one could pass without being butted with the dripping end of a quarter of beef, or smeared by the greasy carcasse of a newly-slain sheep. In many of the narrow lanes there was hardly room for two persons to pass abreast.’39
‘An agitated sea of brute life’. Smithfield Market, around 1830.
By Victorian times, such grotesque scenes were no longer acceptable. A growing distaste for animal cruelty led to a clamour for the market to be closed down – a move made possible for the first time by the arrival of the railways. The livestock market was shifted to specially built facilities in Islington in 1885, and Smithfield became the meat market it remains today. The moment the sight of animal slaughter became too much to bear, the railways came along and saved the day – or perhaps it was the other way around. It is human nature to deal only with what we really have to.
Nobody could argue with the need to close Smithfield down; by the end it was overcrowded, cruel and unsanitary. But its removal cost London something too. For all their mess, noise and nuisance, markets bring something vital to a city: an awareness of what it takes to sustain life. They are what the French sociologist Michel Foucault called ‘heterotopias’: places that embrace every aspect of human existence simultaneously, that are capable of juxtaposing in a single space several aspects of life that are ‘in themselves incompatible’.40 Markets are contradictory spaces, but that is the point. They are spaces made by food, and nothing embodies life quite like food does.
The Grocers’ Tale
Well into the nineteenth century, markets remained the primary source of fresh food in cities all over Europe. However, London proved something of an exception. The authorities’ refusal to grant further market licences during the city’s rapid expansion in the seventeenth century (for fear of losing control) led to food shops springing up illegally. Before long, there were so many in the capital that their presence was tacitly accepted, and the city’s streetscape was duly transformed. Bowed shop windows began to appear, in Cheapside and elsewhere, along with large heavy shop signs, some of them so cumbersome that they were deemed a public danger and banned.41 Many shops still served their customers through an open window, but as Georgian estates spread into the West End, new kinds of food stores opened in order to serve them. The age of the high street had arrived.
With the arrival of the railways, high streets began to replace markets as urban food hubs all over Britain. As cities spread, authorities had no choice but to relinquish the control they had once exercised over food trades. The industrialisation of the food supply made such controls appear unnecessary in any case. Butchers, bakers and grocers began to open in new suburban neighbourhoods, catering to their mainly middle-class residents. The new shops marked a radical shift in the way food was bought and sold in cities. For the first time, significant numbers of the relatively well-off – the burgeoning middle-classes – were buying their own food. No less significantly, trade in food began to move from the public to the private realm.
The grocery trade did not get off to a very auspicious start. The new shops were the antithesis of the old adage that food should be sold transparently. Their interiors were cramped and dark, and most of the produce was stored in sacks or drawers under the counter. There was little advertising and items were not priced, so customers were forced to haggle for goods, something many were not used to. To make matters worse, there was little competition, so customers often had no choice of where to shop (modern occupants of Tescotowns will sympathise). Unsurprisingly, many grocers took advantage of the situation. Deliberate adulteration was rife, with traders mixing fine earth with cocoa powder to make it go further, alum with flour to make it whiter, or displaying fresh butter on the counter while serving customers from rancid stock below. As the opening verses of G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Song Against Grocers’ suggests, such practices became endemic to the grocery trade.
God made the wicked grocer
For a mystery and a sign,
That men might shun the awful shops
And go to inns to dine;
Where the bacon’s on the rafter
And the wine is in the wood,
And God that made good laughter
Has seen that they are good.
He sells us sands of Araby
As sugar for cash down;
He sweeps his shop and sells the dust
The purest salt in town,
He crams with cans of poisoned meat
Poor subjects of the King,
And when they die by thousands
Why he laughs like anything.42
Perhaps it was no bad thing that the poor, who represented at least half the urban population of the time, did not frequent these early shops at all. Most still bought their food at weekly markets that specialised in selling cheap cuts and leftovers from regular markets, and were usually held in community halls on Saturday nights, when most workers’ pay packets came in.
In 1844, a group of Lancashire weavers decided that honest labourers deserved a better deal. Calling themselves the Equitable Pioneers of Rochdale, they banded together to form the world’s first retail co-operative, buying a limited range of goods (flour, butter, sugar and oatmeal) in bulk in order to get them cheaply, and selling them on to their fellow workers at fixed prices, splitting the profits at the end of the year as dividends. The shops were unlike any that had gone before. Every expense was spared in their decor: they had stark interiors bare of any furnishings, with food simply displayed on planks set on barrels or on the floor. But they were well lit, and the produce was clearly priced, much as it is in a modern supermarket. Since the shops were run by people who themselves worked during the day, they were only open in the evenings, but that didn’t stop them from becoming an overnight success. By the First World War, the co-operative movement had three million members in Britain, and a 15 per cent share of all food sales.43
The idea of buying and selling in bulk was soon copied by shopkeepers with rather less socialist intentions. Among them was Thomas Lipton, who had spent much of his youth in America, and returned to his native Glasgow with a concept completely new to British food retail: advertising. When Lipton began selling eggs, bacon, butter and cheese to an unsuspecting public in 1871, he launched his shop with newspaper adverts and posters and a flurry of showmanlike stunts. He imported ‘the World’s Largest Cheese’ for Christmas, hauling it through the streets to the cheers of the crowd, and issued customers with the ‘Lipton £1’, for which they could buy £1 worth of goods in his shop for only 15 shillings.44 The latter wheeze landed Lipton in court, but it was worth it. The additional custom it brought boosted his turnover to such an extent that he was able to undercut his rivals – the first step in his inexorable rise to building the world’s first global food empire. By 1900, Lipton had an international distribution network serving hundreds of retail outlets, his own tea plantations in Ceylon, and 10,000 employees worldwide. Lipton’s Tea, which was sold far more cheaply than any before it, cornered the growing working-class market, and remains Lipton’s most visible legacy. However, it was his pioneering approach to retail, with his dedicated supply chain, own-brand products, loss-leading sales pitches and advertising campaigns, that made him the true pioneer of the modern grocery trade.
Shopping in Sheds
One innovation that eluded Lipton – one that was about to turn shops like his into supermarke
ts – was the concept of self-service. That was the contribution of Clarence Saunders, a flamboyant Memphis grocer who realised that one of his biggest overheads was the time spent by staff dealing with customers. At the start of the twentieth century, most Americans bought their food from homely ‘mom-and-pop’ stores, all-purpose family grocers that often acted as unofficial social centres for the local community. Saunders realised that if he could cut out the sociability of food shopping, he could reduce his prices to unbeatable levels. His self-service Piggly Wiggly store, opened in 1916, was the result. The Piggly Wiggly was essentially the world’s first supermarket, and, considering how many of its features were radically new, its resemblance to the modern version was remarkable. Customers entered through turnstiles, picked up wire baskets to carry round as they shopped, took food off shelves themselves, and queued up to pay for it at checkouts.45 Today we take such behaviour for granted, but back in 1916 it was startlingly different. The store opened to a chorus of cynicism from Saunders’ competitors, but that soon changed to a stampede to copy his ideas when it became clear that, if food was cheap enough, customers couldn’t care less whether they had a cosy chat over the counter as they bought it. Saunders, who had seen this coming, had the foresight to patent his invention, and now made his fortune franchising it to his rivals. Soon, self-service stores were popping up all over America, not just on high streets, but on the edge-of-town sites that were their natural home.
When supermarkets first appeared on the suburban horizon in America, they were viewed with suspicion. Everything about them seemed alien – not least their soulless anonymity. But once word got out about how cheap their prices were, public caution melted away. Taking a leaf out of Thomas Lipton’s book, the new stores offered huge discounts for bulk purchases, and since most customers drove to them, they could load up with as many bargains as they liked. Motorised punters were the last piece of the food retail puzzle – the missing link that signalled the true arrival of supermarket shopping. From now on, the mom-and-pops wouldn’t stand a chance.
By the mid 1950s, the daily food shop was a distant memory for most Americans. Postwar affluence and unlimited space had combined to create a new suburban landscape in which middle-class wage-earners and their baby-boom families lived out the American dream. Throughout the fifties, a million new ‘Homes for Heroes’ were built each year, most of them on plots large enough to require no boundary fences and with plenty of parking space for the essential family fleet of cars. The low-density lifestyle suited supermarkets perfectly. From now on, no suburban neighbourhood would be without one; no American home complete without its automobiles and ‘ice-box’. In the four years after the war, Americans bought 21 million of the former and 20 million of the latter, and while they certainly appreciated their fridges, they positively adored their cars. People shopped in them, ate in them, watched movies in them, made love in them. Even to die spectacularly in them, as James Dean did, was seen as somehow glamorous.
Quite what all this driving around meant for cities was an open question – and it took a European to see that what it demanded was a whole new urban typology. That man was Victor Gruen, a ‘short, stout and unstoppable’ Viennese architect, who escaped to America just before the Second World War with, in his own words, ‘an architect’s degree, eight dollars, and no English’.46 Gruen was soon making a name for himself designing eye-catching shop-fronts for fashionable New York boutiques, but his ambitions demanded a bigger stage, and when the department store Daytons approached him to design a new shopping complex in Minnesota, his chance came. Gruen seized the opportunity to address something he felt to be lacking in his adopted country. It was clear to him that old ‘downtowns’ were dying, and that nothing much was coming in to replace them. American-style suburbia, he felt, had none of the ‘heart, brain and soul’ of traditional European cities.47 He decided it was time to give it some: to create a new kind of city centre for the motor age.
Southdale Shopping Centre, completed in 1956, was the result. The world’s first enclosed shopping mall, its basic idea was simple: take the European high street, and recreate it, under controlled conditions, indoors. It was a brilliant commercial response to Americans’ increasing reluctance to get out of their cars. A vast, introverted, featureless box built in the middle of nowhere, the mall contained enough goodies on the inside – tropical birdcages, luscious planting, fountains and piped music – to become a ‘destination’ in its own right; a fantasy world where people went for a special treat, just as they had gone to department stores in the nineteenth century. Shoppers happily drove there without noticing that once inside, they were actually required to walk. With the benefit of air-conditioning, the extremes of Minnesotan weather – typically a choice between blast furnace or blizzard, depending on the season – were effectively neutralised, creating a ‘year-round climate of eternal spring’, which, according to Gruen, lulled people into walking ten times further than they would have done in a crowded, rainy street.48 In fact, people behaved much as they might have done on a lovely spring day on a traditional high street, spending several hours browsing the shops, stopping for a bite to eat, and then shopping some more. ‘The shopping centre consciously pampers the shopper,’ explained Gruen, ‘who reacts gratefully by arriving from longer distances, visiting the centre more frequently, staying longer, and in consequence contributing to higher sales figures.’49 Southdale opened to euphoric popular acclaim, and shopping would never be the same again.
Within a few years, malls were being built all over America, many of them designed by Gruen himself (and built, as we saw earlier, by Jim Rouse). The malls’ effect on nearby city centres was immediate and striking: they sucked all the commercial life straight out of them. Gruen knew this perfectly well, but, urbanite though he professed to be, his view of ‘downtowns’ was remarkably unsentimental: he believed they were past saving. Malls might spell the death-knell of American cities, but in their place would rise up newer, better ones, designed by – Victor Gruen. For Gruen, malls were cities, creating a new urban order that would provide everything that traditional cities had done, only better. He predicted that malls would become ‘not only a meeting ground but also, in evening hours, the place for the most important urban events’.50 His words have turned out to be horribly prophetic. With Southdale, Gruen created a blueprint whose power turned out to be more potent than even he could have imagined. Like some Tolkienesque ring in the wrong hands, its influence has spread all over the world, destroying the cherished city centres that were once its inspiration.
Southdale Shopping Centre in 1956.
Supermarket Cities
By the early 1950s, America was in love with supermarkets, and Britain was in love with America. Despite the lack of space and even greater lack of fridges (fewer than 8 per cent of British households had one in 1950), the American suburban lifestyle was irresistible to postwar Britain.51 Suburbia, after all, was a British invention; now Britons yearned for the latest American version, with its forecourts, drive-ins and malls.
Supermarkets had been around in Britain since the 1920s – high-street branches of Tesco and Sainsbury slotted in between the butchers, bakers and the rest. But it was American-style superstores that the British now hankered after, and as soon as levels of car and fridge ownership rose high enough to make ‘one-stop’ shopping possible, Britons took to them like eager ducks to water. Superstore development in Britain, as we saw earlier, went virtually unregulated during the 1970s and 80s, the first hint of planning restraint coming in 1988, with the guidance note PPG6 requiring local authorities to ‘take into account’ the effect of new superstores on local town centres before reaching their planning decisions. To judge from the rate at which superstores carried on getting approval (the number more than doubled over the next 10 years), most authorities thought their effect was entirely beneficial. But research published by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) in 1994 suggested otherwise. It found that only 3 per cent of tr
aditional market towns considered themselves ‘vibrant’, and as many as 15 per cent were in decline.52
Things developed very differently in mainland Europe, where laws were put in place to protect traditional town centres as soon as the threat from supermarkets became clear. An Italian law of 1971 required special permits for shops larger than 1,500 square metres, favouring local shopkeepers who wanted to enlarge their stores over any proposals for new development.53 The French Loi Royer of 1973 required local government approval for stores larger than 1,000 square metres, and that of central government for stores larger than 10,000. Although plenty of hypermarkets were built in France, at first they sold mainly non-food items, leaving traditional shopping streets intact. In West Germany, where postwar reconstruction focused on rebuilding town centres destroyed by bombing (even to the extent of faithfully recreating market squares from old photographs), the last thing the government wanted was for those centres to lose their trade. A law was passed in 1980 restricting the size of suburban retail units to 1,500 square metres.54
Britain had to wait until 1996 for any planning legislation with real teeth: a revision to PPG6 requiring local authorities to adopt a ‘sequential approach’ when selecting sites for new superstores. Town-centre and city-edge sites had to be considered first, and only if these were unsuitable would out-of-town sites be permitted. The so-called ‘Gummer effect’ (after the Tory minister John Gummer, who introduced the legislation) was to cause an immediate, if undramatic, slowing down of superstore development. But the new law had other effects too. Deprived of their favourite greenfield sites, supermarkets became inventive about other ways to expand. Their move into the convenience sector dates from this period, but small-scale shopping was never what supermarkets were about. What they really wanted was to build big again. As Joanna Blythman described in her book Shopped, ‘space-sweating’ was the solution they came up with: ways of increasing the size of existing stores, either by building extensions in car parks, or constructing internal mezzanines that, thanks to a loophole in PPG6, required no planning permission.55 In 2003, Asda Wal-Mart used such a move to add a cool 3,300 square metres to its Sheffield store (more than twice the size of an average ‘one-stop’ supermarket), announcing plans to add mezzanines to a further 40 stores. But space-sweating, although useful in the short term, was never going to satisfy the supermarkets. Even as the government moved to close the planning loophole, they had found a much better way to get around the planning system: buying land.
Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives Page 16