The Retail Milk Trade in London, c. 1790–1914

Abstract

the role of retail provision in the expansion of the suburban fringe. 1 Jefferys’s pioneering work on general trends has now been supplemented by several detailed studies, but as yet little of substance has been added to our scant knowledge of the various specialist retailers who seem to have traded in some cities from an early date. The purpose of this paper in looking at milk retailing in London between 1790 and 1914 is to outline the development of one trade which completely changed its nature in the nineteenth century. It will not be argued that the milk trade was typical of food retailing in general, or even that London was representative of the national evolution of milk selling, but it is hoped to show that studies of individual trades in their urban setting can contribute to our understanding of how the Victorian city economy behaved in the important everyday function of supplying retail goods. After an initial exploration of the development of types of milk retailing and a discussion of problems in interpreting available source material, the expansion of the trade will be considered structurally in terms of the “retailing revolution”. The stability of the retailing price will then be shown to have been an important element of associated service provision by dairymen, especially in the doorstep delivery of milk. I Our modern experience of the separation of the production and sale of agricultural produce is quite inappropriate for an understanding of the milk trade in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The demand for regular doorstep delivery of previously ordered quantities, a key structural feature of the trade after about 1850, was rare before this date outside the wealthiest households. Milk was less of a convenience food than it is today, and contributed little to the average diet. Its purchase was either casual, in quantities small enough to prevent wastage caused by souring, or occasional, as part of the cream teas enjoyed by the frequenters of the pleasure gardens and resorts of peripheral London. Throughout the period there was a certain amount of producer-retailing, but the most common means of distribution from early times until at least the 1840s resulted from the first major division of labour in London’s liquid milk trade. In the eighteenth century, vendors had become responsible for the majority of retail sales, and the “milkmaids” in particular entered the folklore of London’s streets with their prominent role in the May Day celebrations, and 1 A select list in order of publication: J. B.Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, 1850-1950 (Cambridge, 1954); D. Davis, A History of Shopping (1966); J. Blackman, ‘The Development of the Retail Grocery Trade in the Nineteenth Century’, Business History, IX (1967); D. G. Alexander, Retailing in England during the Industrial Revolution (1970); M. T. Wild and F. Shaw, ‘Locational Behaviour of Urban Retailing during the Nineteenth Century: The Example of Kingston upon Hull’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, LXI (1974); R. Scola, ‘Food Markets and Shops in Manchester, 1770-1870’, Journal of Historical Geography, 1 (1975); D. Sibley, ‘The Small Shop in the City’, University of Hull Occasional Paper in Geography, xxii (1975); J. Blackman, ‘The Corner Shop: The Development of the Grocery and General Provision Trade’, in D.J. Oddy and D. S. Miller, eds. The Making of the Modern British Diet (1976).