Making the High Street: Walking Tours and Street Views in the 1830s

Abstract

Directories and town guides provide rather different representations of the town: typically, the former offer a kind of socio-commercial quantification through lists of tradesmen and private residents; the latter unfold qualitative descriptions of key historical and cultural locations and create a topographical picture for the visitor. Tallis’s London Street Views (1838–40) and William West’s History of Warwickshire (1830) both do something rather different. Tallis’s street views are well known: a unique visualization of commercial space; West is less familiar and forms the main focus of my paper. I explore the ways in which he drew on particular facets of Birmingham’s commerce and married this both spatially and architecturally with key cultural infrastructure to create a uniquely Birmingham high street and a particular view of the city as commercial and dynamic yet cultured. I then use this perspective to reconsider Tallis’s street views: to consider the spatial context of high street commercial retailing (the buildings and spaces between shops) and whether these were views of London or a series of different districts within London.

Keywords:

• John Tallis
• William west
• trade directories
• Birmingham
• high street
• urban improvement

Notes

1. Roey Sweet, The Writing of Urban Histories in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 107–16; Penelope Corfield, ‘Giving Directions to the Town: The Early Town Directories’, Urban History Yearbook, xi (1984), 22–34.

2. Peter Borsay, The Image of Georgian Bath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

3. Gareth Shaw and Andrew Alexander, ‘Directories and the Local Historian III: Directories as Sources in Local History’, Local History Magazine, 46 (September/October 1994), 12–17; Gareth Shaw and Allison Tipper, British Directories: A Bibliography and Guide (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989).

4. Corfield, ‘Giving Directions to the Town’.

5. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, extract in The City Reader, ed. by Gavin Bridge and Sophie Watson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 386.

6. William West, History, Topography and Directory of Warwickshire (Birmingham: R. Wrightson, 1830), p. iv.

7. West, History, Topography and Directory, p. 184.

8. West, History, Topography and Directory, pp. 184–220.

9. West, History, Topography and Directory, p. 210.

10. West, History, Topography and Directory, pp. 187–88.

11. James Cornish, Cornish’s Stranger’s Guide Through Birmingham (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers, 1851). See also Sweet, Urban Histories, pp. 238–41, 252–55; Joyce M. Ellis, ‘“For the Honour of the Town”: Comparison, Competition and Civic Identity in Eighteenth-Century England’, Urban History, 30.3 (December 2003), 325–37, (pp. 329–32).

12. Similar tours in other guidebooks also overlook these more mundane trades. See, for example, Thomas Hughes, The Stranger’s Handbook to Chester and its Environs (Chester: Thomas Catherall, 1869).

13. West, History, Topography and Directory, p. 188.

14. West, History, Topography and Directory, pp. 188–89.

15. West, History, Topography and Directory, p. 220.

16. West, History, Topography and Directory, p. 213, p. 188.

17. Andy Foster, Birmingham: Architectural Guides (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

18. Corinthian was the approved order for public buildings.

19. See, for example, Jon Stobart, ‘Identity, Competition and Place Promotion in the Five Towns’, Urban History, 30.2 (August 2003), 163–82, (pp. 174–81).

20. West, History, Topography and Directory, p. 213.

21. See, for example, Peter Borsay, ‘Politeness and Elegance: The Cultural Re-fashioning of Eighteenth-Century York’, in Eighteenth-Century York: Culture, Space and Society, ed. by Mark Hallet and Jane Rendall (York: Borthwick Institute, 2003), pp.1–12.

22. See Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’ (London: Vintage, 2008). For discussion of the construction of London as an imperial city, see Michael H. Port, Imperial London: Civil Government Building, 1851–1915 (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds, Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).