HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2024-12-13T14:20:30.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: “Leisure was built into the whole shopping experience” | Annie Gray on the history of the high street
items: Why is the shopping day after Thanksgiving called ‘Black Friday’?
items: The medieval marketplace: a time traveller’s guide to shopping in the Middle Ages
items: Has there always been panic buying? And when have people panic shopped through history?
items: Shop ’till you drop: a brief history of Christmas shopping
items: A brief history of shopping
items: A handbook to shopping in ancient Rome
items: 9 ways our food shopping habits have changed since 1947
items: A history of the high street
items: Ancient civilisations and Victorian shopping

“Leisure was built into the whole shopping experience” | Annie Gray on the history of the high street
type: item
date: 2024-12-12T09:00:54.000Z
creator: Dr Annie Gray
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Shopping
description: Ellie Cawthorne talks to Annie Gray about how the evolution of the high street has been a story of growth, specialisation and diversification – but also of entertainment and enduring appeal
encoded: What can looking at a high street in any given era tell us about that period? So much. If you walk down any high street, you’ll see the things that people want and need on an everyday basis. So if you were strolling down a high street in, say, 1903, you’d have saddlers and leather workers, and specialist shops selling pork and different meats. You’d see a lot of shops selling cloth, because ready-to-wear clothing wasn’t around then. And you’d encounter lots of items that we simply don’t have a role for in our lives today – tiny little bits of ironmongery and things like that. Read more | A history of the high street Alongside the quotidian stuff, high streets have always been relatively prestigious areas for leisure shopping, featuring the likes of jewellers, swordsmiths, clockmakers and lace merchants. Luxury goods such as these are often imports, so they can tell you a lot about Britain’s place in a global context. Take tea for example: it was first sold in china shops, then in high-end grocers, then – as it became cheaper – everywhere. Just following the journey of tea reveals so much about the way in which people interacted with the global landscape of commercialisation. When did a cluster of shops that we might recognise as a high street first appear in British towns? The evolution of the high street was a really gradual process. The market was still the most important place to shop – certainly for the working classes – well into the 20th century. Market day was always the busiest day in town. But between 1650 and 1750, most towns in Britain begin to have some fixed shops, usually around or leading from the market. One of the first types of shop to move into fixed premises was the butcher. That kept mess away from the main shopping area, and enabled butchers to lock up stock and install cold stores. Read more | A brief history of shopping Traditionally, the market square was also a gathering place – somewhere people went to enjoy entertainment, to jeer at crimi…

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Why is the shopping day after Thanksgiving called ‘Black Friday’?
type: item
date: 2021-11-24T06:05:00.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Shopping
subject: Thanksgiving
description: On the shopping day known as 'Black Friday', millions descend on the shops to spy out the best bargains. How did the day get its name?
encoded: Black Friday has been adopted as the unofficial opening to the Christmas shopping period. It all began in the United States as a day of ‘doorbuster’ sales the day after Thanksgiving but increasingly, Britain is getting into the swing of things – sometimes literally, as brawls and all-out fights are quite common among scrapping shoppers. Retailers love the day of discounts as billions are spent within a matter of hours, but there is one organisation for whom the day brings nothing but despair: the police. Read more | A brief history of shopping In 1966, the Philadelphia Police Department grew so frustrated by the congested streets, traffic jams and regular tussles that, it's believed, they coined the name ‘Black Friday’ in the hope of dissuading people from heading to the shops. It completely failed, but the name stuck. Understandably, retailers weren’t keen on the name – it had strong associations with the Great Depression of the 1930s, signalled by Black Thursday – so they tried to reinvent the image of the Black Friday frenzy. The ‘black’, it was argued, referred to the ledgers used by retailers. For the majority of the year, shops would be ‘in the red’ (losing money) but Black Friday indicated the moment when most retailers would start making a profit, or going ‘in the black’. So that is how Black Friday got its name. There is no evidence to the regularly espoused theory that it went back to a 19th century tradition when slave owners would sell their weak or elderly slaves at low prices. Fortunately, that story is purely apocryphal. This article was taken from BBC History Revealed magazine

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The medieval marketplace: a time traveller’s guide to shopping in the Middle Ages
type: item
date: 2020-11-25T06:05:00.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Shopping
description: How much did average items cost in a medieval market? And what was for sale? Ian Mortimer, author of The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England, takes us on a shopping trip in a 14th-century marketplace, from the sights and smells to how to avoid being conned out of your wages…
encoded: The poet WH Auden once suggested that, in order to understand your own country, you need to have lived in at least two others. But what about your own time? By the same reckoning, you need to have experienced at least two other centuries. This presents us with some difficulties. But through historical research, coming to terms with another century is not impossible. We can approach the past as if it really is ‘a foreign country’ – somewhere we might visit. And we do not actually need to travel in time to appreciate it – just the idea of visiting the past allows us to see life differently, and more immediately. Come shopping in the late 14th century and see for yourself. The medieval marketplace “Ribs of beef and many a pie!” you hear someone call over your shoulder. Turning, you see a young lad walking through the crowd bearing a tray laden with wooden bowls of cooked meats from a local shop. All around him people are moving, gesturing, talking. So many have come in from the surrounding villages that this town of about 3,000 inhabitants is today thronged with twice as many. Here are men in knee-length brown tunics driving their cattle before them. Here are their wives in long kirtles with wimples around their heads and necks. Those men in short tunics and hoods are valets in a knight’s household. Those in long gowns with high collars and beaver-fur hats are wealthy merchants. Across the marketplace more peasants are leading in their flocks of sheep, or packhorses and carts loaded with crates of chickens. Medieval misconceptions: 12 myths about life in the Middle Ages – busted Crowds are noisy. People are talking so much that chatter could almost be the whole purpose of the market – and in many ways it is. This is the one open public area in the town where people can meet and exchange information. When a company performs a mystery play, it is to the marketplace that they will drag the cart containing their stage, set and costumes. When the town crier rings his bell t…

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Has there always been panic buying? And when have people panic shopped through history?
type: item
date: 2020-03-17T14:59:11.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Pandemics
subject: Shopping
description: Despite vehement calls from governments and retailers alike for people not to stockpile, coronavirus fears are driving many people to the supermarkets to empty the shelves of supposedly essential goods, like toilet paper and tinned food. But what drives this behaviour? And have people always responded this way? Jonny Wilkes explores the history of panic buying…
encoded: The behaviour seen in cases of panic buying is – as psychologists are currently popping up on all the news outlets to explain – a very human reaction. It may not be wholly rational at times, but it is understandable. At times of an imminent disaster, such as storms or flooding, it satisfies a need to prepare for however long the problem lasts. Incases like coronavirus, when there are so many unknowns, panic buying is an extreme attempt to take back a sense of control and proactivity at a time of great anxiety. These needs and the resulting ‘herd behaviour’ are nothing new for humanity, and history is replete with examples of panicked groups hoarding supplies. It is easy to imagine that during the Black Death in the 14th century, everyone in Europe would have felt a little more protective over their next meal. When was toilet paper invented and what did people use before? When did panic buying, as we know it, begin? But panic buying could be seen as a relatively young phenomenon, born in the 20th century thanks to the combination of several factors: populations with expendable income; a degree of comfort among those populations, to the point of complacency, that supply and access to everyday goods would remain unbroken; and tools of widespread communication so people learn of a disaster about to hit in advance. The Wall Street Crash: what happened? During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the tensest-of-tense Cold War standoffs precipitated by the Soviets installing nuclear weapons on Cuba, there may not have been social media to spark panic like today – but daily news reports certainly did the trick. Following US President John F Kennedy’s address to the nation on 22 October in which he informed the nation that there were Soviet missiles (located just 90 miles off the coast of Florida), Americans in major cities began stockpiling canned goods and bottled water in their basements to help see them through an attack. Unscrupulous salesmen also enjoyed a roaring (if sho…

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Shop ’till you drop: a brief history of Christmas shopping
type: item
date: 2019-11-14T09:00:24.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Christmas
subject: Shopping
description: When it comes to exploiting Christmas for all its commercial possibilities, the Victorians take some beating. Mark Connelly looks at how our forbears turned the season of goodwill into an orgy of consumption and shopping
encoded: Nowadays it is often said by both clergy and members of the general public alike that Christmas is no more than an orgy of consumerism, and that the message of Christmas has been drowned in a frenzy of competitive present-buying and consumption on an almost obscene level. However, this complaint is by no means new. In fact, it stretches back to the last quarter of the 19th century, a time when many of us believe Christmas, infused by the spirit of Charles Dickens, was more homely, wholesome and spiritual. Did Charles Dickens invent Christmas as we know it today? Christmas carols: the history behind 5 festive favourites Another much repeated ‘fact’ about Christmas is that it was invented by the Victorians, and Charles Dickens in particular. While there is no doubting the fact that the Victorians, partly inspired by Dickens, were fascinated by the celebration of Christmas, they didn’t invent it. Rather they reinvigorated it and brought together the many Christmas customs of Britain and threw themselves into the season in a way not seen before. Being a nation of manufacturers, industrialists and shopkeepers, it was not long before Victorians realised that Christmas, with its emphasis on generosity and hospitality, could be exploited for commercial possibilities. With the growth of a department store culture in Britain from the 1870s, the scene was set for a fusion of sentiment and shopping to arrive every year in late November, and it wasn’t long before some began to complain. Listen | Pen Vogler explores Victorian food through the life and works of Charles Dickens Dickensian delights Buying for Christmas was not entirely a development of the late 19th century, however. Before the late 1870s to early 1880s there was additional purchasing for Christmas, but much of this shopping was centred on exotic and special foods. Gift giving was important, but its general profile was relatively low. In A Christmas Carol (1843) Dickens mentions toys bought as children's gifts, but …

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A brief history of shopping
type: item
date: 2018-11-23T07:30:00.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Shopping
description: Where is Britain's oldest shop? And was Selfridges really the first department store? Julian Humphrys serves up four facts about our shopping culture...
encoded: Where is Britain’s oldest shop? The site with the strongest claim appears to be the Boxford Stores in the Suffolk village of that name. Records suggest that this partly medieval building has been open for business in one form or other since the reign of Henry V. If you want to see what a medieval shop might have looked like, check out the merchant’s house in French Street in downtown Southampton. Built at the end of the 13th century for a local wine merchant, it features a vaulted cellar for stock, accommodation for the family and a shop at the front of the property. When did shopping malls arrive? The shopping mall has a surprisingly long history. London’s Royal Opera Arcade, completed in 1818, and Burlington Arcade (1819) sought to woo well-to-do shoppers away from the city’s muddy, crowded streets into a more genteel environment. Looking back even further, the trading floor of London’s Royal Exchange, opened by Elizabeth I in 1571, was in 1660 surrounded by a two-storey shopping mall featuring 100 kiosks and shops. A brief history of Harrods Christmas shopping: Shop ’till you drop A time traveller’s guide to medieval shopping Was Selfridges the first department store? Though Harry Selfridge’s Oxford Street store, opened in 1909, was perhaps the first to sell shopping as a pastime rather than a chore, Britain’s first true department store had begun trading over a century earlier. Harding, Howell & Co’s Grand Fashionable Magazine, which opened on Pall Mall in 1796 with four departments selling furs and fans; haberdashery; millinery; and jewellery, ornaments and perfume. When did we go self-service? Though the world’s first true self-service store – the intriguingly named Piggly Wiggly – opened in Memphis, Tennessee in 1916, it wasn’t until after the Second World War that the idea caught on in Britain. Sainsbury’s first self-service store opened in Croydon in 1950. As Alan Sainsbury found out to his cost, the concept wasn’t universally popular. When one customer rea…

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A handbook to shopping in ancient Rome
type: item
date: 2016-12-18T09:00:00.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Life in ancient Rome
subject: Shopping
description: If you fancied some serious retail therapy in the ancient world then, as Claire Holleran reveals, the streets of Rome were the place to be...
encoded: Ancient Rome was a cosmopolitan city, drawing in people and products from across the Mediterranean world and beyond. By the late first century BC, there were as many as one million inhabitants in Rome, an urban population figure not reached again in the western world until London in around 1800. Like most urban residents, the people of Rome relied on retailers to provide them with food, clothing and other goods. Our ancient evidence points to a thriving retail trade in the city and, for any ancient visitor, the sheer number of retailers and shoppers must have been one of the most striking aspects of the Roman cityscape. Retailers were found in the busiest areas of the city. Small shops and workshops lined the main thoroughfares, spilling out over their thresholds into the streets and colonnades. The poet Martial remarked that until the emperor Domitian issued an edict banning this practice, Rome looked like one big shop. A brief guide to Ancient Rome & the Romans How ethnically diverse was Roman Britain? Roman medicine: 6 ways people stayed healthy in Ancient Rome Market traders, street sellers and ambulant hawkers also tended to be found in central areas. They clustered around temples, bathhouses, forums, circuses, amphitheatres and theatres, attracted by the commercial opportunities offered by large gatherings of people. Sellers at temples offered votive offerings such as flower garlands, while those at the amphitheatre may have sold gladiatorial programmes of the type mentioned by Cicero in the mid-first century BC. Perishable items that could be eaten straight away were also a common sight on Rome’s streets. Prepared foods such as bread, hot sausages, pastries, and chickpeas were perfect for a busy Roman on the run. Reliefs and paintings, drawn mainly from Pompeii and from Rome’s port city of Ostia, are our best evidence for the appearance of Roman stalls. Temporary stalls are visible in a painting (shown right) from Pompeii of a riot in its amphitheatre – a dep…

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9 ways our food shopping habits have changed since 1947
type: item
date: 2015-01-15T13:19:01.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Shopping
description: They reveal the trends, tastes and spending habits of the times, and now the items in our shopping baskets are being used to chart the culinary history of the UK since 1947. Here, food journalist Andrew Webb reveals nine ways in which our food shopping habits have changed over the decades: from postwar austerity to the rise of frozen foods…
encoded: In 1947 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) began recording the prices of everyday items on a ‘national shopping list’, to help calculate inflation. Through to today the list is updated every year: new products are added, while others are quietly dropped. As the prices of the various items in the basket change over time, so does the total cost of the basket, thus movements in consumer price inflation indices represent the changing cost of the shopping basket. By looking into these imaginary baskets we can build up a picture of the changing shopping and eating habits of postwar Britain. Here are some of the highlights… Wild rabbit anyone? That first list from 1947 contains such things as small white loaf, wild rabbit, tin of corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, prunes, tea, cocoa and condensed milk. It also features Sild, or small herrings, which were sold in tins. Cold comfort for cans In the 1940s hardly anybody owned a fridge, so tinned food was enormously popular. This explains the presence of canned fish and condensed milk in the basket. Food such as fresh meat and bread, meanwhile, were shopped for daily by the housewife, and carried back home by hand. Baked beans appeared in the first basket (in 1947) alongside other tinned ingredients such as peas. By 1974 canned tomatoes were also present, as was plenty of canned fruit. But by 2009 the only cans on the list were tomatoes, sweetcorn and baked beans, marking the can’s fall from grace. It’s always time for tea Unsurprisingly, tea has appeared – in one form or another – in every basket since 1947. Initially this was in the form of loose-leaf tea – teabags did not appear in the basket until 1980. Sadly, loose leaf was removed in 2002, reflecting a decline in sales. Herbal and fruit teas were added in 2001, but remained for just one year. By 2003 there were only plain old teabags in the basket. A slice of history Corned beef in cans was present in the first basket in 1947, and by 1980 appeared as two distinct vers…

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A history of the high street
type: item
date: 2010-11-06T11:58:16.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: General Early Modern
subject: General Modern
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Shopping
description: Juliet Gardiner is working on a new BBC series in which shopkeepers relive the high street experience from 1870–1970. Here she traces the rise and fall of what was once the nerve centre of communities across the UK
encoded: The high street is a British universal. Shopping – whether doing the shopping of necessity or going shopping for pleasure – is something that everyone does. Yet the high street in many of Britain’s towns and cities is now in what seems like terminal decline. Rows of empty shops litter our cities; the footfall of shoppers is desultory and occasional. Out-of-town supermarkets, hypermarkets, retail parks and online shopping have rendered redundant scores of the high streets that once not only served communities’ material needs but were the focus for many of their activities. They were a place of provisioning and commerce but also a meeting place; a hub of social as well as monetary exchange. What has been lost in this decline is the thread running through Turn Back Time, a six-part series airing on BBC One this month. It's an ambitious project which focuses on the Somerset town of Shepton Mallet to explore the evolution of the high street over 100 years, starting in 1870. Shops have been bought and real-life shopkeepers and their families – a baker, butcher, grocer, ironmonger and dressmaker – installed. Their role is not only to keep shop under conditions familiar to everyone from Victorian retailers through to those who worked in the Sixties consumer boom, but also to interact with the town's modern-day shoppers. In doing so, they aim to show the people of Shepton Mallet something of shopping experiences over a century and see if this could persuade them back to their former ways. As a social historian I have joined Masterchef presenter Greg Wallace and a fifth-generation baker, Tom Herbert, in the 'Chamber of Commerce' to ensure that the shopkeepers have an authentic historical experience – and to realise the maxim that the social history of Britain can be seen through its shop windows. What is the origin of the term 'High Street'? Rupert Matthews, historian and author, answers a popular question… There are thought to be about 3,000 roads in Britain called High Stre…

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Ancient civilisations and Victorian shopping
type: item
date: 2008-12-19T14:11:49.000Z
subject: General ancient history
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Shopping
description: Stephen Conway returns to 1775, Professor Mark Connelly describes how the Victorians began to shop until they dropped, The 'father of history' on one of the great ancient civilisations
encoded: How to download the History Extra podcast

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