Kathryn Morrison, ‘Bazaars and Bazaar Buildings in Regency and Victorian London’, The Georgian Group Journal, Vol. XV, 2006, pp. 281–308 TEXT © THE AUTHORS 2006 BAZAARS AND BAZAAR BUILDINGS IN REGENCY AND VICTORIAN LONDON KATHRYN A MORRISON INTRODUCTION upper- and middle-class shoppers, they developed ew retail or social historians have researched the the concept of browsing, revelled in display, and Flarge-scale commercial enterprises of the first discovered increasingly inventive and theatrical ways half of the nineteenth century with the same of combining shopping with entertainment. In enthusiasm and depth of analysis that is applied to the devising the ideal setting for this novel shopping department store, a retail format which blossomed in experience they pioneered a form of retail building the second half of the century. This is largely because which provided abundant space and light. Th is type copious documentation and extensive literary of building, admirably suited to a sales system references enable historians to use the department dependent on the exhibition of goods, would find its store – and especially the metropolitan department ultimate expression in department stores such as the store – to explore a broad range of social, economic famous Galeries Lafayette in Paris and Whiteley’s in and gender-specific issues. These include kleptomania, London. labour conditions, and the development of shopping as a leisure activity for upper- and middle-class women. Historical sources relating to early nineteenth- THE PRINCIPLES OF BAZAAR RETAILING century shopping may be relatively sparse and Shortly after the conclusion of the French wars, inaccessible, yet the study of retail innovation in that London acquired its first arcade (Royal Opera period, both in the appearance of shops and stores Arcade) and its first bazaar (Soho Bazaar), providing and in their economic practices, has great potential. covered venues for the fashionable shopping It may persuade us to modify our views on the promenade when extreme weather or excessive ground-breaking character of later nineteenth- traffic rendered Bond Street inhospitable. In both century retailing, and may even shed new light on the arcade and the bazaar a large number of retailers the genesis of the department store. was assembled beneath one roof, controlled by a This article sets out to convey something of the single proprietor. This concept was not completely scale and ambition of early to mid- th-century new. Medieval selds seem to have been organised in a retailing by examining London’s long-vanished similar manner, as were the long shopping galleries, and long-forgotten bazaars. These were permanent or pawns, of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century establishments, and should not be confused with exchanges. temporary charity bazaars, or ‘fancy fairs’. Architecturally, arcades and bazaars were very Pevsner dismissed bazaars as ‘merely a fashion in different from older retail building types, and from nomenclature’, but they were much more than this. one another. Arcades aspired to be streets, rather To indulge the tastes, pastimes and aspirations of than rooms, and evolved from the idea of the covered THE GEORGIAN GROUP JOURNAL VOLUME XV BAZAARS AND BAZAAR BUILDINGS pavement, represented by the Rows in Chester or the remained at the opposite end of the retail spectrum Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells. While walkways in to bazaars. exchange galleries had been lined by open stalls, those Bazaars were exclusive private enterprises, with in arcades were flanked by small, glass-fronted shops, counters rented out to traders on a franchise basis, with accommodation for the shopkeepers above. much like present-day department stores. It required Bazaars more closely resembled exchanges and, for a large capital sum to set up a bazaar and, over the that matter, modern department stores. Their years, many entrepreneurs suffered heavy losses, capacious open-plan interiors were equipped with even bankruptcy, when their ventures failed or their solid counters (or ‘standings’), rather than flimsy premises burnt down. Despite such risks, the stalls or shops, and provided fluid circulation routes rewards from a successful bazaar could be great. (or ‘promenades’) for customers (invariably ‘visitors’). Financial gain was doubtless the primary motivation While both the arcade and the bazaar offered behind the setting up of bazaars, but proprietors opportunities to shop, promenade or lounge, bazaars were eager to publicise their philanthropic intent in also staged a tantalising array of entertainments and order to win support. They portrayed their exhibitions for the amusement and edification of businesses as benevolent establishments, offering an their patrons. outlet for goods produced in their homes by The origins of the arcade lie in France, where the respectable people who could not afford to rent and building type was created at the Palais Royal in furnish a shop, including impoverished tradespeople – , but the bazaar took root in London, where and artisans. In particular, the first bazaars were the Soho Bazaar of February was the first of its concerned to assist disadvantaged women, such as war kind. The term ‘bazaar’, borrowed from the Arab widows. Nowadays most shop assistants are female, word for market, had been used periodically to but in the early nineteenth century apprenticeships describe European markets since at least the in London drapers’, haberdashers’ and even fourteenth century. Interest in eastern culture was milliners’ shops were offered almost exclusively to stimulated by Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt during men, so bazaars presented a rare opportunity for the s, to the extent that one of the very first respectable and relatively independent retail Parisian arcades was called the Passage du Caire. In employment to women without substantial capital. the poet Robert Southey described the last of But not every bazaar counter was run as a fledgling London’s seventeenth-century exchange shopping business by an enterprising female. Advertisements galleries, Exeter Change, as ‘precisely a bazar’, in London newspapers reveal that many standings probably suggesting nothing more than a passing were managed as branches of larger businesses and resemblance to an oriental market. With the opening staffed by assistants. And the largest bazaar enterprises of the Soho Bazaar, however, the term acquired a – sometimes occupying separate rooms or suites – much more precise definition, and a standardised were invariably run by men. English spelling. For small-scale retailers it was less of a risk to take Aside from their names, the Soho Bazaar and its a counter in a bazaar than to rent a shop. For a couple followers had little in common with the noisy and of shillings a day, a trader with a satisfactory character colourful eastern bazaar. The closest English reference and a stock of goods could rent a stretch of equivalent to this was the public provisions market counter and make a decent living. Although the rent which, in the course of the nineteenth century, was was calculated on a daily basis, most standings were taken over by municipal authorities and, to some held for months or years. But bazaar retailing was not extent, sanitised and improved. Markets, however, without its dangers: in the entire stock of THE GEORGIAN GROUP JOURNAL VOLUME XV BAZAARS AND BAZAAR BUILDINGS traders (mostly women) in the Western Exchange J. M. W. Turner does not seem to have displayed Bazaar on Old Bond Street was destroyed by fire, finished paintings in bazaars, but he recalled: ‘... leaving them destitute and dependent on charity. there was a stall in the Soho Bazaar where they sold The first bazaars portrayed themselves as drawing materials, and they used to buy my skies. patriotic as well as benevolent, thus garnering even They gave me s. d. for the small ones, and s. d. greater public support. At the Soho Bazaar articles of for the larger ones! ... There’s many a young lady foreign manufacture ( e.g. French gloves) could not has got My sky to her drawing’. Turner’s skies be sold without special permission: those disobeying apart, bazaar paintings were of notoriously inferior this rule would be ‘prosecuted with the utmost rigour quality. of the law, as an enemy to the whole community’. All bazaars were strictly governed. Rules and Similarly, the Western Exchange was set up primarily regulations, based on those of the Soho Bazaar, were for ‘British Manufacturers, Artists and Dealers’. drawn up by the proprietor and implemented by a But, as the memory of the French wars abated, manager and supervisors. It was invariably stipulated bazaars began to stock foreign goods. In the that goods had to be marked with fixed prices and Baker Street Bazaar announced that foreign articles sold for ready money rather than credit, something would be admitted for sale, and in the Royal that had become increasingly common in cities and Bazaar on Oxford Street was said to sell ‘ bijouterie fashionable resorts in the second half of the and nic-nacs, the Nouveautes de Paris and Spitalfields eighteenth century. Haggling was banned, ensuring – Canton in China, and Leather-lane in Holborn’, that exchanges between vendors and customers were perhaps with the implication that the provenance of polite, civilised and short; there was ‘no clamour – some goods was questionable. In the s the no useless noise, or confusion’. The traders had to Chinese Hong sold ‘all sorts of Chinese curiosities’ at dress plainly and neatly, and were not permitted to the Pantechnicon Bazaar in Belgravia, and in the receive goods in the bazaar. To enforce this, s and s the Portland or German Bazaar on persons carrying parcels, bundles or loads were Langham Place specialised in German toys. banned from most establishments, and wholesale Although many bazaars had furniture showrooms, transactions had to be conducted outside bazaar most merchandise fell into the category of fancy or hours, usually meaning before o’clock in the artistic goods, and if conventional shops occupied morning, or after o’clock at night.