Cheap Street: London'S Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, C.1850-1939

Description

From around 1850, London's street markets grew in number and scale, giving working-class Londoners a site for shopping, entertainment and sociability. Cheap Street is the first major study of this subject, analysing the street markets as a component of London's lively informal economy, and providing new insights into urban and consumer geographies. -- .

Victoria Kelley is Director of Research and Professor of the History of Design and Material Culture at the University for the Creative Arts -- .

'Throughout, Kelley evokes the vibrancy and spectacle of the street markets. The chapter on 'Streets' is a highlight, due no doubt to her expertise in the history of design and material culture. ... These stories do not just stick in the mind. London's irregular markets were full of delight and stimulation, but at the same time complicated categories and norms of metropolitan society. Kelley lets London's street markets dazzle us, before making us think again.' Charlie Taverner, Cultural and Social History '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.' Judith Walkowitz, Victorian Studies 'Kelley's hugely entertaining treatment of the market culture of the East End provides an important contribution to the literature surrounding the area and the cultures of poverty and subsistence that underpinned the "informal" economy of the poor ... There is a breadth of scope and an adventurousness of interpretive method here that gives Kelley's study a refreshingly different take on some traditional themes.' Antony Taylor, Left History -- .