Cheap Street: London’s Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, c.1850-1939, by Victoria Kelley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cheap Street: London’s Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, c. 1850–1939 by Victoria Kelley Judith R. Walkowitz (bio) Cheap Street: London’s Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, c. 1850–1939, by Victoria Kelley; pp. xiv + 224. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, $118.00. In Cheap Street: London’s Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, c.1850–1939, 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. She points to major surveys on poverty, from Henry Mayhew to Charles Booth to the New London Survey of the 1930s, which successively documented the vast expansion of street markets in the metropolis between the 1850s until the onset of the Second World War. Throughout this period, market stalls were essential food distribution spaces for London’s poor. Market sellers continued to purvey the basic staples of fruits, vegetables, and fish that were available in the 1850s, although a distinctive minority of stalls diversified into nonperishables, thus offering poor Londoners access to the cheap luxuries commodity market. The fact that these barely regulated sites of exchange proliferated amid the brick-and-mortar retail revolution of the Victorian era is just one of many historical dialectics identified by Kelley. Following the lead of cultural theorists and historians, Kelley shows how street markets occupied space on the ground in defiance of urban planning and developed in tandem with a rationalized urban economy. She also establishes the cultural impact of the markets, tracing printed descriptions and music hall performances that ultimately configured the street trader as the quintessential “Cockney,” a small entrepreneur who resisted authority but remained committed to mutual support and self-regulation (133). Thanks to powerful stage renditions, along with what Kelley calls “popular memory,” market people and their performances helped to frame how certain plebeian Londoners saw themselves (139). The first chapter offers a “narrative history” (12) of the street market’s “informal economy” (9). While metropolitan inspectors kept a sharp eye on authorized food markets engaged in wholesale trade and occupying off-street premises, municipal authorities virtually ignored street retail trading to the poor. As a result, street market traders might be subject to sporadic policing, as established in the Metropolitan (Streets) Act of 1867, but they paid no rent and enjoyed a steady yet fragile tenure on urban space. The disregard of municipal authorities ended in 1927, when street markets became subject to a licensing system that concentrated on space, time, and activity (meaning the type of commodity for sale). Even so, most of the informal conventions of the street markets continued until wartime conditions disrupted them. Subsequent chapters of the book are ordered thematically and devoted to “Things,” “Streets,” and “People.” In these sections, Kelley gives some attention to diachronic shifts in the commodities purveyed, the increasing Jewish presence in the East End markets, the growing reputation of the street markets as tourist attractions, and the cultural popularity of market types in music hall performances. Overall, however, her emphasis is less on differences over time or between markets than on enduring patterns and configurations. Kelley’s astute discussion of the architecture of market street represents her most original contribution to the history of the street market. Exploiting her skills as a design historian, she outlines the “fragile architecture” constructed out of the street’s barrows and stalls (95). Even though the street market was transient, appearing and disappearing from day to day, with no permanent facilities, the double line of barrows assembled [End Page 451] along the street afforded a cumulative sense of enclosure and “filled a customer’s field of vision” (97). This fragile architecture shaped the bodily experience of visitors. Visual representations of the markets predominantly reproduce the perspective of shoppers immersed amid crowds and stalls. Compared to the “scopophilic effects” of the shopping emporia of the West End, with their bright lights and shining glass, a visit to the market represented a multi-sensory experience of sounds, smells, and sights (103). As Kelley notes, Cheap Street is the first book-length scholarly study of London’s modern street markets. It builds...