Food markets and shops in Manchester 1770–1870

Abstract

It is one of the minor oddities of the recent “boom” in urban history that we know so little about so central an activity as how the people living in nineteenth-century towns bought their food. Of course, there are always a great number of subjects that we would like to know that little bit more about, but after all, the purchase of food did represent a half to two-thirds of working-class budgets for much of the nineteenth century. And we are a nation of shopkeepers! Yet until recently, the subject of food distribution within nineteenth-century industrial towns was a long way down the agenda of research topics. [2] We would like to think that this was not through lack of interest but was due to the authoritative nature of one major work on the subject, J. B. Jeffery's Retail trading in Britain, 1850–1950 .