THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROPERTY AUCTIONS

Though it was built in the nineteenth century, the Auction Mart had eighteenth-century origins. Its significance can only be understood in the context of a broader transformation in British social and economic life that set the conditions for new commercial cultures and practices like public auctions, for new categories of marketable urban and suburban property and property buyers, and for new kinds of commercial and institutional spaces in London and elsewhere. This period was marked less by the overall growth in the quantity of goods consumed than by changes of taste, quality, and consumer demand; a nation of consumers became accustomed both to new goods and new methods for marketing them.Footnote ¹⁶ Commerce likewise depended on the greater movement of goods and people and the extension of social networks between individuals living and working across greater distance—be it within cities, between city and country, London and provincial towns, or the metropole and its expanding imperial network. This “economy of strangers,” as James Vernon has called it, generated forms of economic abstraction that reconfigured how people thought about the economy and their own economic lives.Footnote ¹⁷ In terms of real estate, urban development and the demand by new classes of investors further encouraged the use of commercial practices that could communicate information to a broader public. Commerce, finance, and empire all found institutional expression in the development of London, and, in particular, the City. London thrived as a central place of commercial and imperial power, and its institutional fabric reflected this in the design of new spaces like the Bank of England (opened in 1734, but greatly expanded under the design of Sir John Soane after 1788), the Corn Exchange (1749), the Coal Exchange (1770), the Stock Exchange (1801), and the Auction Mart.Footnote ¹⁸

From the late seventeenth century, auction sales developed as a popular institution of British commercial culture, though not one that was initially used for many real estate transactions. As Brian Cowan has noted, auctions were integral to the forms of genteel sociability that shaped British metropolitan consumer culture, but he also demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of public auction sales at this time—88 percent in a survey of printed advertisements from the 1660s through the 1690s—concerned works of art and rare books.Footnote ¹⁹ These were the sales “by candle” that took place in London's proliferating coffeehouse culture and that so fascinated contemporaries like Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, and Robert Hooke. Auctions similarly linked and facilitated the movement between the expanding networks of British imperial trade and commerce. Many of the great trading routes that fueled British expansion relied on auctions as the primary method of sale. This was true for slaves in the West Indies and American Colonies, for bulk imported goods carried back to London docks, and for the diverse and exotic luxuries made available in the metropolis through colonial profits.Footnote ²⁰

Following the growing popularity of auctions for personal property, public sales of real property became more common from the mid-eighteenth century. Based on a survey of printed advertisements, Peter Ash established that the first auction of land or house property likely took place in the 1730s and was probably the work of the most prominent auctioneer of the day, Christopher Cock.Footnote ²¹ Cock hosted auctions in his Covent Garden office and though he was initially known as a bookseller, one advertisement in the spring of 1739 included the sale of two houses among the other property being sold from a bankrupt tradesman.Footnote ²² By the 1740s, the same office routinely posted advertisements for the public sale of land and houses, along with continued sales of personal property. In 1766, when James Christie opened his Great Room in Pall Mall, he likewise featured auctions of landed estates and other real property. By the late eighteenth century, auctions—for real and personal property—had spread throughout the country and were so associated with the consumption of luxury goods as to become subject to state regulation. Under the Auction Duty Act of 1777, taxes and license fees specifically distinguished between sales of real and personal property.Footnote ²³ Regulation played an important role in defining auctioneering as a distinct occupation, but so too did a process of specialization that resulted in auctioneers developing expertise in particular branches of trade. Thus, an article written for the Penny Magazine in 1844 observed that the “connoisseur in pictures and prints, goes his rounds regularly through one series of rooms … The book-collector has his special haunts … Furniture occupies the principal attention of a third class of auctioneers, carriages and horses of a fourth.” Finally, there were “the mighty ones of the calling,” those who traded in estates.Footnote ²⁴

Modern social theory argues that auction mechanisms flourish in social contexts where more heterogeneous populations no longer view traditional networks of privately exchanged information to be effective or reliable.Footnote ²⁵ As a general principle, this would suggest that the development of real estate auctions in eighteenth-century England reflected a reconfiguration of exchange mechanisms, perhaps in response to uncertainty in the value of new forms of property or as a means of connecting more socially or geographically distant sellers and buyers. Neither of these was universally true, however, since private treaty remained the more common means of exchanging property. Indeed, there are many examples of large estate owners trusting in private mechanisms to find buyers and negotiate market values, turning to public sales only as a last resort.Footnote ²⁶ When the London solicitor James Coulthard organized the sale of the third Duke of Chandos's Radnorshire estates in the early 1770s, for example, he combined the use of private networks of professional contacts with public printed advertisements, employing a competitive bidding mechanism and the threat of a public auction sale if the property (or portions of it) failed to attract interest.Footnote ²⁷ Sales of estates were also often driven by debt, and many families on both sides of an exchange preferred the less exposed and more trustworthy route of private negotiation.Footnote ²⁸ Suspicion over the public exposure of an auction sale persisted into the nineteenth century. When the solicitor in charge of selling the Rushall Estate in Wiltshire wrote to the Duke of Wellington in 1837, he confided that the owner, Sir Edward Poole, feared an unsuccessful auction might depreciate the value of the estate. Asking about the advisability of an auction sale, the agent wrote, “I have no right to ask your opinion, but I should like to have it.”Footnote ²⁹ Wellington declined to purchase the property, but it was ultimately advertised for sale at the Auction Mart the following year, suggesting that Poole and his lawyer overcame their initial hesitancy.Footnote ³⁰

In the case of the Rushall Estate and for many others, public sales offered a valuable mechanism for attracting a diverse community of spectators and bidders. This was certainly true for the kind of large sales that drew national attention, such as one in 1824 that put Richard Arkwright into possession of Sutton Hall for £482,432 or one that enabled the Duke of Devonshire to sell his estate at Wetherby for £168,561.Footnote ³¹ There is no historiographical consensus on the degree to which new wealth aspired to settle in estates, but it is clear that there were enough new purchasers from the ranks of urban business and professions to justify new marketing techniques. John Habakkuk has suggested a list of possible purchasers that includes returning nabobs, politicians, clergy, merchants, bankers, lawyers, West Indian planters, seamen, and industrialists.Footnote ³² Moreover, the market for smaller properties was not necessarily less diverse, as B. A. Holderness has shown in Lincolnshire, where a steady volume of smaller sales fed the demand of local farmers, regional merchants and professionals, and even distant metropolitan investors.Footnote ³³ In 1813, Arthur Young certainly believed that “the great influx of wealth has of late years been the means of making property more general.”Footnote ³⁴ Auction sales contributed an important marketing mechanism to this process.

Auctions were also used for many different types of property, from very large estates to much smaller parcels generated through the breakup of estates and urban development. At the aforementioned auction of the market town of Wetherby, the Duke of Devonshire disposed of his nearly 1,500-acre estate in 170 lots of farm, residence, and commercial property; this kind of subdivision appears to have happened with greater frequency throughout the nineteenth century. “Experience goes to prove,” stated one guide to estate management from 1868, “that, in disposing of any extensive estate to secure the largest price … sell it in lots.”Footnote ³⁵ The author instanced the case of a small estate outside of London, initially purchased for £1,600 but then broken up and sold in lots for a total of £21,980. This kind of subdivision often preceded more intensive urban expansion and development, though the process started well before the nineteenth century. For the counties surrounding London, land began to be subdivided into “mini-estates” for retiring professionals early in the eighteenth century. At this time, Daniel Defoe remarked upon the many “handsome large houses” on the border of Essex.Footnote ³⁶ The growth of London thereafter generated new residential properties on planned estates in west London by the likes of Grosvenor, Portland, and Bedford, as well as speculative house building there and elsewhere across the city.Footnote ³⁷ Later in the nineteenth century, building societies and freehold land societies would also use auctions as a means of disposing of improved building lots.Footnote ³⁸

The forces of estate improvement and urban development produced exactly the kind of property that was typically advertised for sale by auction in London around the time of the Auction Mart's construction.Footnote ³⁹ In a single issue of the Times from 1805, for example, the firm of Winstanley & Son advertised a wide range of upcoming real estate auctions, including the following: the 1,073-acre estate and manor of Warkworth in Northamptonshire; a mini-estate “in the Vicinity of Clapham” with a “New erected Villa” and fourteen acres of land; and, a sale in multiple lots for a mix of freehold commercial property (shops and public houses) and dwelling houses situated on Bull Inn Court and Maiden Lane, the Strand. A week later, the father-and-son firm previewed another auction for a leasehold residence on 58 Gower Street, held by the Duke of Bedford on an eighty-two-year term. Elsewhere in the paper, a great many advertisements gestured to London's outward expansion, such as in the ad published by Allport & Son for a three-acre leasehold farm in Hackney, “eligible for carrying on the gardening business or [that] at any easy expence [sic] might be converted into a desirable residence for a genteel family;” or another ad by Smith for a leasehold timber house and yard in nearby Hoxton, “well calculated for building a manufactory and dwelling-houses in a populous improving neighbourhood.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Across the city, auction sales mobilized the commoditization of property—from residential villas to public houses and riverbank manufactories—by alerting prospective buyers to sales and convening them to negotiate values and prices.

By the nineteenth century, auctions had become a widespread and accepted means for marketing real property. In 1853, Alfred Cox, an estate agent practicing in London, supposed that

Cox rightly pointed out that selling property by auction involved a change in “public opinion” regarding how property should be treated in the marketplace. Unlike transfers by private treaty, auctions entailed a significant degree of commercial spectacle, a “rude exposure to public gaze,” that could be deeply unsettling to more traditional notions of propriety and ownership. This gaze depended both on the existence of new publics interested in the purchase of land and houses and on the ability to reconfigure the marketability of real property in public space. Marketability, in this sense, refers not only to the strictly legal conditions often used at the time to define “marketable” titles but to a broader spectrum of new material and spatial practices, cultural configurations, and social dispositions. These collectively enabled and made meaningful the buying and selling of real estate. The cultural construction of public marketability was particularly noticeable where the spectacle of an auction sale was most visible, which is to say, at the auction itself. It should be of no surprise, therefore, to see those with the most to gain from auction sales paying close attention to the design of auction space, which is exactly what happened in the opening decade of the nineteenth century.

AN IMPROVED PROPERTY MARKETPLACE

One anonymous author announced a call to reform the marketplace in a pamphlet published in 1807.Footnote ⁴² The overlap in style and content between this document and the prospectus for the new Auction Mart that was circulated only months later strongly suggests a single author, which a later source would identify as George Edmund Shuttleworth.Footnote ⁴³ Shuttleworth became a founding director of the Auction Mart, and though he was not listed as an original shareholder, it is nevertheless reasonable to suppose that it was he who led the effort to build it. In An Address to the Auctioneers of the Metropolis, Shuttleworth celebrated the development of auctions in a phrase that was subsequently copied in the company prospectus. “Public Auctions,” he wrote, “have … been adopted as an impartial and just medium for the exercise of individual competition—to accelerate the Transfer of Property—to open the Channels of Commerce—and to promote the Spirit of Enterprize and Speculation.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Unfortunately, despite the progress of auctions, Shuttleworth complained that the “present accommodations for Public Sales in London [were] totally inadequate.”Footnote ⁴⁵ He then presented a detailed critique of Garraway's Coffee House in Exchange Alley—a place well known for stock trading in the history of eighteenth-century finance but that had also become the leading place for auction sales by the turn of the century.

Though it is difficult to say how or precisely when Garraway's assumed its reputation as an informal institution for auctioneers, the shift may have represented greater specialization in metropolitan auction sales. Up to that time and continuing into the nineteenth century, many auctions were typically held either “on the premises” or in local inns and taverns. Based on a sample of auction advertisements in the Times, Brian Learmount has estimated that as late as 1788 most sales still took place in this way. By 1805, however, a similar sample suggests that Garraway's and a few other private salerooms, like Christie's offices on Pall Mall, had come to host well over 90 percent of all advertised auctions for real estate.Footnote ⁴⁶ All the same, the rising status of Garraway's did not stop Shuttleworth from charging its owner, “Mr. H.” (William Howell) with being “extremely negligent of his duty” to the seventy or so auctioneers estimated to be using the institution. He accused Howell of refusing to give auctioneers sufficient advertising space for handbills and particulars of sale, of discriminating against particular individuals, and of charging unjust fees for the use of rooms. Shuttleworth also complained more generally that the arrangement of rooms at Garraway's made it difficult to attract the public to sales, particularly because the rooms most commonly given for auctions were located in the uppermost floors, and there was nothing to guide visitors to them. The lack of maps for the city and country as a whole also made it challenging for auctioneers to point out “the local advantages of Property.” Finally, Shuttleworth pointed out the difficulties of negotiating the sea of information available in newspapers (briefly suggesting that auctioneers should set up their own press dedicated to announcements), and railed against unqualified practitioners and mock auctioneers operating in various parts of London. While the idea of a purpose-built marketplace was not explicitly raised in this pamphlet, it did conclude with a call for the city's auctioneers to convene as a society that could help reform Garraway's and defend the best interests of the profession.Footnote ⁴⁷

No records survive of the meetings that took place during the winter of 1808, and though Shuttleworth had initially expressed a willingness to work with Howell, it is clear in hindsight that attention quickly settled on a more ambitious plan to construct a new building exclusively for the benefit of auction sales. Perhaps the gathering decided to follow Parisian notaries, who had made a similar decision to open an auction room for realty in 1804. The choice may also have reflected general sympathy with Shuttleworth's enthusiastic call for professional independence and autonomy.Footnote ⁴⁸ In any event, well over fifty auctioneers invested in the initial shares that were distributed on 4 February 1808. The laying of the foundation stone for the Auction Mart was celebrated that September, with a procession of workmen, directors, and city officials (including the lord mayor), who convened at the London Tavern on Bishopsgate Street before parading down to the site on Bartholomew Lane.Footnote ⁴⁹ Fifteen months later, in January 1810, the Auction Mart opened for business, with public sales of property located in London, Middlesex, Surrey, Hertfordshire, and Suffolk. These sales comprised a variety of property, such as leasehold and freehold commercial property, building land, dwelling houses, and landed estates—as well as canal shares, insurance policies, and other annuities.Footnote ⁵⁰

When the directors of the Auction Mart published their prospectus in 1809, they imagined a marketplace that would both elevate the status and prestige of a profession and respond to the practical concerns outlined in Shuttleworth's pamphlet. The combined aspirational and practical purpose of the building perhaps said something about the individuals who built it. Those behind the Auction Mart's initial construction, the directors listed in the company's prospectus, came from a cross section of London's most elite auctioneers, nearly all of them having established their businesses in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Richard Winstanley, for example, opened his office on Paternoster Row in 1783. John Prickett expanded his father's carpentry business in 1789 to include auctioneering and surveying, and Henry Robins (whose son George would become the nineteenth century's most famous auctioneer) entered business with his brother, John, in 1790. Harry Phillips left his job as a clerk at Christie's auction house to set up his own firm in 1796. Phillips could obviously boast of establishment connections, but others, like Prickett and Robins, arrived at auctioneering via neighboring trades in agriculture, building, and furniture.Footnote ⁵¹ Three of the twelve directors listed in the prospectus—Robins, John Page, and Richard Jaques—had also been among the founding members of the oldest known professional association for auctioneers, the Select Society of Auctioneers, established in 1799.Footnote ⁵² As an expression of particular interests, therefore, the Auction Mart captured the view from the top of this particular branch of commercial society.

Many of the Auction Mart's founders held specific ties to the trade in real estate. Winstanley, Prickett, Robins, and Phillips regularly advertised sales of land and houses in the Times—as did other directors, such as Daniel Rolfe Munn, Richard Jaques, and John Anthony Hermon. In fact, beyond the circle of directors, the majority of the investors in the Auction Mart held some connection to the sale of realty. The surviving register of proprietors lists fifty-six original shareholders.Footnote ⁵³ Sixteen of these sold their shares within a year or two of the initial distribution in 1808, leaving approximately forty owners who were either invested for a longer term, often until their death, or were already prominent real estate auctioneers. Of these, approximately twenty-seven, or two-thirds of the more committed investors, can be identified as having advertised real estate sales on a regular basis around the time of the Auction Mart's founding. Of course, it is unlikely that many of these auctioneers had specialized to the point of working exclusively with real estate; the Auction Mart itself was, at least initially, intended to include sales of personal property. All the same, some specialization had undoubtedly begun and would continue, and the bulk of those most active in the Auction Mart's construction spent much of their time selling estates and other residential and commercial property located in and around the metropolis.

For these founders, the work of imagining a new kind of real estate market required a new kind of institution, set at the heart of Britain's commercial and imperial metropolis. Such an institution would provide “an accumulated source of intelligence, so methodically disposed, as to render the most accurate information, readily attainable.”Footnote ⁵⁴ “Existing practice[s],” noted the prospectus, left the public “exposed to so many inconveniences, irregularities, and unpleasant alternatives, that long experience, has impressed the absolute necessity of more extensive, and superior arrangements.” The directors also sought to link the Auction Mart in a broader geography of commercial landmarks found nearby in the city. The prospectus, for example, praised the “almost mechanical precision” by which the new Lloyd's Coffee House, which had been relocated to the Royal Exchange in 1774, had managed to organize the “intricate, diversified, and multifarious” transactions of the maritime insurance market.Footnote ⁵⁵ The authors of the company's prospectus self-consciously positioned the Auction Mart within “immediate contiguity to those active scenes of business, the Bank of England, Royal Exchange, Lloyd's Coffee House, the Stock Exchange, and other Public Offices,” whose proximity to their establishment “cannot be too highly appreciated.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The corner of Bartholomew Lane and Throgmorton Street placed the Auction Mart only short steps from the city's major credit and securities markets. This undoubtedly lent prestige and convenience to the new institution, though it also acknowledged the social fluidity and ambiguity that still existed between different kinds of commercial and financial activity. The Stock Exchange had only just begun to effectively limit its membership to jobbers and brokers, and as late as 1845, David Moirer Evans complained of “little go” or “alley men” loitering in the court joining the Exchange to the Auction Mart and speculating in second-rate shares.Footnote ⁵⁷

To convey the novelty and vision of the new company, its owners took particular care to advertise the precise details of the Auction Mart's exterior and interior design. Based on an architectural plan by John Walters, the Auction Mart rose two stories above the ground floor, with a mezzanine and a basement containing offices and cellar space for a coffee house (figure 1). The mezzanine offered ten office rooms overlooking the central hall. Salerooms were located on the upper two floors and were allocated for sales of estates on the first and sales of personal property on the second, with special turret lights in the latter rooms for the display of artwork.Footnote ⁵⁸ Each of these floors also included side rooms for private consultations during public sales. The coffee room was located on the side of the building opposite the Bartholomew Lane entrance, accessible from both the main stairwell of the Auction Mart and Throgmorton Street. The rear entrance to the coffee room also linked the Auction Mart directly to the Stock Exchange via Shorter's Court. The room was thus positioned as a liminal space between the formal hall and salerooms of the Auction Mart and the nearby market for securities. Its inclusion undoubtedly represented a concession to the prevailing culture of commercial sociability, but it is interesting to observe that its location placed it in a subordinate position with respect to the main entrance and the more formal spaces of the building. At least in theory, the Auction Mart demarcated spaces of private and public exchange in a pattern that echoed the City of London's changing commercial geography from a mixed-use central district with a resident population to a space of purpose-built commercial and financial infrastructure.Footnote ⁵⁹

Figure 1

Rudolph Ackermann, Interior View of the Coffee Room at the Auction Mart, Bartholomew Lane, 1811. Aquatint on paper. Reproduced by permission of the London Metropolitan Archives, City of London, www.collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk. Image 1043.

The most extravagant feature of all was the Auction Mart's central atrium, or Saloon. This hall was accessible from the main, ground-floor entrance and was connected to all other functions of the building: salerooms on the upper stories, offices on the below-ground floors, and the coffee house in the rear (figure 2). The prospectus for the Auction Mart gave the greatest attention to the details of the Saloon, going so far as to offer a pull-out plan for the space, which enabled viewers to reconstruct its dimensions by raising its four walls off the page. Within this space, the directors promised to “obviate” the “evil” of limited market perspectives “as speedily as the effect of time, and industry will permit.” The Auction Mart would be made “the grand, and central point, for the most prompt information, immediately connected with, or bearing the remotest affinity, to the various denominations of property.” At first glance, what most defined the vision of the Saloon was this function as a vast repository of information, more efficient than newspapers, greater in scope than any individual firm, and more accessible than the research of any single individual.

Figure 2

Rudolph Ackermann, Interior View of the Hall in the Auction Mart, Bartholomew Lane, 1811. Aquatint on paper. Reproduced by permission of the London Metropolitan Archives, City of London, www.collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk. Image 1041.

Even more important than the amount of information gathered in the Auction Mart, however, was its organization in space and time. Arranged on each of the four sides of the Saloon, notice boards offered prospective buyers concise listings of the particulars of sale for each form of property. Real property dominated both the north and south sides, with a portion of the latter arranged to display fine art and merchandise and a smaller compartment on the west side for other personal and commercial movables. The remaining compartments on the west and east sides contained general information, notices of postponed sales, and of sales made by private contract. The hall likewise offered a collection of maps and atlases: of the world, of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, of the City of London, of individual counties, and of water and road transportation networks. Daily, weekly, and periodical newspapers from London and from leading provincial towns were offered, indexed, and archived for future reference, and it was similarly proposed to keep at the Auction Mart county and city district registers in which property for sale by both auction or private treaty would be gathered together for ready viewing. In addition, the Auction Mart would appoint provincial agents who would be responsible for gathering and transmitting information between city and country agents and owners, and it would offer distribution services for those wanting regular updates on forthcoming sales and particulars.Footnote ⁶⁰

Alongside this coordination and representation of the property market, the Saloon offered devices for managing and regulating the market in time. For example, a large stove set in a hexagonal frame at the center of the hall contained a weekly register of approaching sales and a large clock and bell mounted on its top, with which to monitor the pace of sales going on throughout the building. “The sales commence immediately on ringing the bell,” noted a sign along the staircase to the upper salerooms. The various registers and notice boards also corrected another time-related problem that the Detailed Prospectus identified with the existing system of advertisements, which were often placed in papers subject to the needs of other political, social and journalistic schedules. A heated debate in Parliament or a particularly exciting scandal might cause havoc with the proper timing of advertisements for upcoming auctions.Footnote ⁶¹ The clock and calendars in the Saloon insulated the world of property exchange from outside events, focused the attention of buyers and sellers on the flow of upcoming sales, and thereby reinforced the distinction between commercial life inside the Auction Mart and the world beyond.

Via this grand assemblage of spatial and information technology, the associated salerooms and offices of the Auction Mart, would “be rendered efficient” and “by this arrangement every person, comprised in the extensive population of this great commercial Empire, may at one concise view … ascertain if any situation adapted to his avocations, or suitable to his convenience, be attainable, or if any other object of his pursuit, can be accomplished.”Footnote ⁶² The Auction Mart held out the promise of a public institution through which sales of property in the country and beyond would be effortlessly made available to potential buyers. The time and space of the property market were compressed, ordered, arranged, and made visible and predictable to a disinterested audience of vendors, agents, brokers, speculators, and the general public.

It was not enough for the Auction Mart to just gather and organize information, however; to operate most effectively, it also needed to organize people. Charles Knight gave a sense of this function in his three-installment series on London auctions published for the Penny Magazine in 1844. Knight encouraged his readers to imagine themselves as visitors to the Saloon, situating them as direct observers of a supposedly comprehensive and universal field of market information. “Even as we pause in the hall to look around us,” he wrote, “the systematic arrangements for the management of the business of the mart, that meet the eye, convey a forcible impression of the extent of that business.” Seeing the market was the essential step to participating in it, but this act required discipline and adherence to a prescribed order of operations. After first consulting announcements of postponed or canceled sales, “the eye falls upon the tables that show us the sales of to-day,” followed by a careful study of the calendar for future sales and their associated sale rooms.Footnote ⁶³ Once again, the Auction Mart both configured the market and empowered new forms of disinterested agency.

The same article explicitly contrasted these arrangements with the more modest amenities found at Garraway's. While the coffeehouse “still flourishes in a kind of immortal youth” amidst the “dingy-looking shops or dungeon offices” that lined Change Alley, the magazine quickly passed over its salerooms, noting that they “present nothing remarkable.” A city guidebook published around the same time admitted that “[a]n introduction to it [Garraway's], under other circumstances than that of a sale of landed property would scarcely induce the visitor to believe that it had ever been appropriate to such a purpose, or was calculated to attract the attention it does.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Such contrasts based on the themes of disorderliness, informality, and historical association became common tropes for underrating the continued use of Garraway's as a competing market for property auctions.

With few exceptions, published representations of the Auction Mart rarely investigated the salerooms themselves. When they did, it was often with a tongue-in-cheek swipe at the pretentions of auctioneers and their performances behind the rostrum. In Portraits of Public Characters (1841), for example, James Grant wrote a humorous profile of the legendary “prince of auctioneers,” George Robins, in which Grant offered another tour of the Auction Mart, but with a focus on the “celebrated locality” of Robins's first-floor saleroom. Commanded at the front by Robins's raised rostrum, the room was otherwise small, “notwithstanding the amount of business done in it, and the importance of the transactions of which it has for so many years been the theatre,” and with space for “[no] more than 150 persons, even in a standing position.” Grant poked fun at Robins's reputation for elaborate and exaggerated descriptions of property, writing that, despite his “athletic figure,” Robins had conveniently placed a single armchair at the back of the rostrum “into which he is accustomed to throw himself … when fatigued by his exertions.” “Such is the place,” wrote Grant, “in which property of the value of £50,000 or £60,000 is often, in the course of two or three hours, transferred from one person to another; and in which, from first to last, estates and houses worth millions, have, through Mr. Robins's potent agency, been made to change hands.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Through his satire, Grant revealed the spectacle of auction sales and hinted at the energy and anxiety associated with such dramatic transfers of ownership. In this sense, the salerooms stood in contrast to the more orderly view of the property market that was represented by the Saloon.

Contrary to the ambitions espoused in the Detailed Prospectus or in these other published accounts, the Auction Mart was not, and never would be, a universal marketplace for the sale of property in London, nor could it offer a “concise view” of property for sale across all of England, the United Kingdom, or the British Empire. However, it does appear to have quickly secured its position atop the hierarchy of metropolitan property marketplaces. Whereas Garraway's had hosted the majority of real estate auction sales in 1805 (166 of 183 sampled ads), by the summer of 1810, six months after the Auction Mart had opened, that proportion had fallen to only 26 percent, significantly eclipsed by the Auction Mart's share of 61 percent (131 of 215 sampled ads).

The Auction Mart also attracted the attention of readers outside of London and the Home Counties through advertisements for provincial estates. On 2 July 1810, for instance, the Gloucester Journal posted a notice for the auction of the Pontrylas Estate in Herefordshire, which was to be sold by the firm of Hoggart and Phillips at the Auction Mart on 27 July. On 2 September 1817, the Chester Courant similarly advertised the forthcoming public sale to be held at the Auction Mart for a manor estate in Bremerton. Provincial papers also advertised estate sales beyond their own localities, such as when, on 16 September 1830, the Leeds Intelligencer posted ads for sales to be held at the Auction Mart by George Robins for properties in Shropshire, South Wales, and Bristol. The predominance of estate sales in these ads spoke to the broader national audience for this type of property, though it was not uncommon to see sales for smaller farm property as well. By mid-century, sales at the London Auction Mart were routinely advertised in provincial papers across England.

STRANGERS, NEIGHBORS, AND THE SOCIAL PRACTICE OF MARKETABILITY

Nearly all of the abovementioned representations of the Auction Mart, though produced in different times and addressed to different audiences, echoed and reinforced a vision of the property market that the institution's founders had carefully implanted into its social and material designs. The Auction Mart, in other words, was as much an ideological project as a practical one, reconfiguring in spatial terms an ideal field of commercial relations that simultaneously problematized the existing order of property exchange. Its arrangement anticipated a world in which property information would circulate unhindered between vendors and buyers; a world in which local notices of property sales would readily be amalgamated into a comprehensive perspective; a world inhabited by a public whose encounters in the auction room would be mediated by nothing more than their own commercial disinterest. This was a very different world from the existing one, which was characterized by informal institutions facilitating personal and local exchanges. As has already been suggested, comprehending this ideological function of the Auction Mart is at least as important as measuring the extent of its practical achievement, since doing so reveals the social and cultural terms through which nineteenth-century real estate was made marketable.

That being the case, the Auction Mart could just as easily function as a space to debate the uncertainties and opportunities of marketability as to project and affirm them. Thus, while Grant celebrated the commercial spectacle of George Robins swinging his hammer to market landed estates, he also cautioned his readers to consider the Auction Mart “as a place possessing peculiar claims to the attention of the moralist.” The auction room, he continued, “is rife with the records of the ruin and wretchedness which noblemen and gentlemen have brought on themselves by their extravagance, their dissipation, and their folly.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The specter of aristocratic debt haunted the sale of many estates and its murmurings could never entirely be drowned out by the shouts of bidders, no matter how well the latter were accommodated in the halls and rooms off Bartholomew Lane. In theory at least, the Auction Mart isolated the marketability of property by “disentangling” it from its own historical, geographical, and moral associations; in practice, the entanglements of social relations were never so easily kept out.Footnote ⁶⁷ The cultural conditions of sale, so to speak, were always and everywhere negotiable.

This was particularly true when it came to questions of disinterest and anonymity among participants at auction sales, and among visitors to the Auction Mart in particular. Unlike the Stock Exchange or Lloyd's Subscription Rooms, the Auction Mart was built with the intention of providing information about real estate for sale to any member of the public, not just subscribers. The marketability of property was premised on the supposed virtue of strangers availing themselves of timely and trustworthy information. “The public indiscriminately may avail itself of the advantages connected with [the facilities at the Auction Mart],” wrote Ackermann, but even his optimism quickly sounded a note of suspicion: “It is but justice to add, that a system of order, regularity, and propriety prevails throughout this whole establishment; that the utmost attention and civility is paid to every individual; [and] that the most minute information on all subjects connected with trade or sale, is frankly communicated.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Here Ackermann implicitly contrasted the Auction Mart with less reputable establishments, but he also sounded a note of caution that could easily reverberate back into the salerooms of the Auction Mart.

Of course, fears of collusion and fraud at “mock auctions” were perennial worries in the nineteenth century, and these reveal the inherent ambiguities of value and social trust that characterize this type of exchange context; these fears could seem particularly acute—not to say humorous—when it came to sales of real estate. For example, in her short story “Purchasing a Property” (1841), Julia Pardoe explored the ambiguities of trust and agency at the Auction Mart by implicating its practices in a satirical morality tale of commercial fraud.Footnote ⁶⁹ The story relates the misfortune of Launcelot Barham, a former stockbroker retired to a “comfortable little independence” and dignified in his distant connections to a baronet and London sheriff. Desiring to leave his flat in the city for the “babble of green fields” he explores various suburban villages advertised for private sale in newspapers, but his quest for the perfect home is frustrated until, several months into his search, he is caught walking in the street during a sudden rainstorm. He finds shelter “as if by a singular happy chance, in the Auction Mart, where a sale was at the moment going forward, of estates and houses in and about the metropolis.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Barham's indifference to the goings on in the Auction Mart is soon tempered by the “strain of elevated eloquence” coming from the auctioneer, who at that moment offers “an elegant and substantially-built stone residence, on the banks of the Thames, with right of fishing in the river, right of common on Runnymeade, and sundry other immunities.”Footnote ⁷¹ Seduced by the auctioneer's assurances and by the energetic bids of several curious characters in the salesroom, Barham purchases the property for seven hundred pounds. He sets out to celebrate in the offices of his childhood friend, the solicitor Henry Hotham, whose practice Barham tellingly ridicules: “Here you are, up to your neck, as usual, in paper and parchments, making out titles for pigsties, and spoiling parchment, while I have contrived, without a single stroke of the pen, to become proprietor of a freehold estate, and the master of a stone-built residence on the banks of the Thames.”Footnote ⁷² Unimpressed, Hotham questions his friend and is shocked to learn that Barham did not inspect his purchase beforehand. The two depart to visit the property, where they ultimately discover, to Barham's chagrin, that the stone residence was nothing other than an abandoned tollhouse at Staines Bridge.

Through the character of Barham, Pardoe depicted an experience in the Auction Mart different from the one envisioned in the institution's prospectus and celebrated in other descriptions of its operation. It was telling, for example, that Barham happened upon the Auction Mart by chance, his decision to enter forced upon him by a downpour of rain. His entry by a back door bypassed the Saloon entirely and instead threw him directly into a saleroom, where the auctioneer and the duplicity of the gathered audience gradually disarmed his suspicions and led him into a series of uninformed bids. Barham surely fit the definition of a stranger to property, but nothing in his experience conveyed the ordered and rational calculation that the Auction Mart was ostensibly intended to offer such strangers: there was no “concise view” of the property market, nor any sign of “systematic arrangements” other than those suggesting collusion and deceit. Indeed, Barham's experience at the Auction Mart was implicitly contrasted with his solicitor's more secure and trustworthy world of parchments and private exchange networks. As a stranger to property in a community that was anything but disinterested or anonymous, Barham experienced the moral dangers of questionable marketability in a place that had been built to eliminate them. Pardoe's message of caveat emptor was as clear as it was unsettling to anyone seeking a shortcut to property via the Auction Mart.

In reality, even in the absence of outright fraud, the Auction Mart clearly did shelter a known community of regular property dealers and agents, who could often be hostile toward outsiders. One of these habitués was Edward Ryde, a land surveyor based in Woking and later president of the Surveyors Institution (1880–83). In his personal diaries, Ryde recorded many visits to the Auction Mart over the course of his career, starting in 1847, when he recalled the spectacle of Edmund Robins auctioning William Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon: “Certainly never was such an Auction ever conducted before at the Auction Mart nor probably ever will again.”Footnote ⁷³ Several years later, in 1849, a visit to Bartholomew Lane became an opportunity for Ryde to network with others and even bid on their behalf. “Return to town, and go to the Auction Mart,” he wrote, “where to my surprise I meet Hry. Dewalt, who attended there to bid for a public House at Ripley. I attend the Sale with him and bid as high as £650 for him; the House is however purchased for £660 by Strong of Woking.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In 1855, Ryde signed on to be surveyor to the South Eastern Railway Company, which put him in the position of planning auction sales at the Auction Mart for the company's surplus lands, and set him up to be more critical of outsiders in the auction room. Following a sale in May, for instance, Ryde boasted of its success—“land in small pieces fetched marvelous sums”—but also complained to his diary about the presence of “one Mr. Caldecott, a relation of Mr. Coles Child [the industrial builder] [who] made himself most annoying and yet ludicrous during his sale by asking foolish questions.” Ignorance also had a price, as Ryde also noted: “He [Caldecott] … burnt his fingers by buying one lot very dear indeed.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In contrast to Barham, Ryde saw the Auction Mart as a familiar place, where the presence of strangers was an annoyance and occasional disruption to the marketability of property, albeit often to the advantage of the vendors.

If Launcelot Barham suffered for being unknown in the Auction Mart, and Edward Ryde suffered in spite of being known, Thomas Frewen might best be described as having thrived as a known unknown—a stranger by design. Frewen was a landowner who occasionally employed proxy bidders to hide his identity and maximize his economic advantage as a purchaser of property. For Frewen, being a stranger in the Auction Mart, or at least acting like one, really did offer advantages, perhaps not in the way intended by the Auction Mart's creators, but certainly in contrast to the less anonymous world of private or local exchange networks. Frewen moved to his family's Sussex estate at Brickwell in 1836, managing his family's other properties in Sussex, Leicestershire, London, and Ireland from then until his death in 1870. Throughout this time, he assiduously worked to expand his holdings through a number of private and public purchases and his estate correspondence—in particular the letters exchanged with his personal solicitor, William Nanson—discuss a number of auction room tactics that add further insight and nuance to an already complicated picture of the Auction Mart and the marketability of property within it.

In one letter, penned on 9 April 1841, Frewen informs Nanson of an estate in the parish of Brede, adjacent to Brickwell, advertised to be auctioned in May by Shuttleworth & Sons at the Auction Mart. “One of these lots [Shearfold Farm] I wish to buy,” he wrote, “as I fancy if I can purchase by some secret agent it will be bought cheap.” Frewen then asked Nanson to obtain particulars of the sale but cautioned him to act “informally, through a London agent who should be told not to mention for whom he wants it for if you write in person Shuttleworth will make enquiry from Smith [the tenant] down here & it may possibly be surmised that you are asking on my behalf.” Though Frewen wanted only a single lot, he also thought it better for Nanson to “enquire about the whole as it will look more like an indifferent purchaser.” Assuming that all was well with the estate, Frewen then requested Nanson “to appoint some stranger to bid for me.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Such attempts at anonymity were not uncommon in trying to gather information about properties for sale, but they do seem to have been particularly viable when it came to sales at the London Auction Mart, where distance from the locality made it easier to hide Frewen's intentions from his neighbors. In another example from letters exchanged in the summer of 1858, Frewen strategized over an upcoming auction of Mill Corner, a nearby property owned by a resident of London, referred to in the correspondence by the last name Cox. Frewen had made earlier attempts to purchase portions of the estate from Cox but had been rebuffed with offers that Frewen found exorbitant, but Cox's decision to sell the land now provided a new opportunity for Frewen to obtain it by auction rather than through direct contact. Since both knew each other well, the ability to feign disinterest by proxy was essential to Frewen's plan, and so he asked Nanson “to get some one who would not be supposed to be connected with me or you [to] attend the sale.” “[I]f either Cox or Barnes [the auctioneer] think I want it they will make me pay.”Footnote ⁷⁷

In both of these examples, Frewen skillfully disentangled himself from the geographical and social associations that he feared would bias him as a bidder and would increase the costs of purchasing the properties in question. Pretending to be a stranger to property leveled the economic field and reconfigured the conditions of marketability in ways that avoided the entanglements of social intimacy and local proximity. And though such strategies could be and certainly were used for a variety of public and private property sales, the Auction Mart undoubtedly made it easier to employ them. The Auction Mart was no place for neighbors. Frewen ended up the purchaser of both the above lots, at prices below what he initially feared he would be forced to pay.Footnote ⁷⁸

Thus, the Auction Mart could provide, in some instances, an effective stage for performing disinterest. This was not always the case in local settings, where Frewen faced a much greater degree of exposure, albeit in ways that sometimes played to his advantage. When Frewen's solicitor in Leicestershire, Benjamin Adam, received a visit from Mr. Duncan in February 1869, it was because Duncan had already suspected that Frewen might bid against him for a freehold estate that would soon be put up for sale at the Crown Inn in Oakham. Anticipating competition, both Adam and Duncan agreed that “of course there could be no personal feelings in the case.”Footnote ⁷⁹ All the same, it was arranged that Frewen would refrain from bidding on the condition that Duncan take only the portion of the estate that he desired and sell the rest to Frewen at a discount. Summing up the arrangements after the auction, Adam reassured Frewen that “you save a good deal of money, by getting rid of Mr. Duncan's competition and as you suggest it is the more neighbourly course.”Footnote ⁸⁰ A month later, Adam wrote to Frewen again with news of another purchase made on the latter's behalf, this time for a house. It might well have sold for less than the closing bid of two hundred pounds, presumed Adam, had the local mason who was bidding against Frewen recognized the agent Adam had employed for the sale. It was only after Adam himself bid that the mason understood who he was against and so declined to compete any further, afterwards telling Adam that “if he had known the biddings were for you [Adam] he would not have bid so high.”Footnote ⁸¹ For better or for worse, these local sales involved forms of scrutiny, deference, cooperation, and “neighbourly” obligation that contrasted sharply with Frewen's earlier success as a stranger to property at the Auction Mart.

In Frewen's case, anonymity worked in ways different from the way it had for the character of Barham or in the experience of Edward Ryde. In several of Frewen's purchasing strategies, he expressed deep concern about being known in the auction room, particularly by the venders of property or their agents, who might be able to ascertain his identity and use this information to demand a higher price. By employing “secret agents” to bid on his behalf, Frewen was able to get the cheapest possible price from his neighbors. Without question, the marketability of property was still embedded in the local relations between Frewen and his neighbors, but the Auction Mart provided a means for hiding those relations behind a mask of disinterest. If Pardoe's story of fraud in the Auction Mart offered a warning to would-be bidders who were strangers, Frewen's experience demonstrated an opportunity for those who could combine inside knowledge with perceived anonymity. The appearance of anonymity, however, was far more useful than was its actual experience, and in this way, the Auction Mart provided a new social and symbolic field for exploring the complexities, ambiguities, and threats that shaped any ostensibly disinterested exchange of property.

THE MARKETIZATION OF REAL ESTATE

Historians have underappreciated the Auction Mart's function as a social and cultural space for imagining and reconfiguring the nineteenth-century property market. Like many other institutional spaces that emerged in this period, the Auction Mart reflected the social and economic change brought about by a more commercial and urban society, but it also shaped how that change would be experienced and understood. One way it did so was to provide an idealized model for what a modern property market should look like: created in response to the perceived limits of the commercial infrastructure of the previous century; organized through the power, ambition, and prestige of an emerging class of property professionals; and assembled in space, with devices to gather and mobilize property information for a public of disinterested strangers. The work of abstraction was significant in and of itself, even if in practice the idea was only ever partially realized. Equally significant, however, was the focal point or stage that the Auction Mart offered—in life and in fiction—as a place to adopt and adapt the practice of anonymous and disinterested market agency. Auctions everywhere invited participation of this kind and validated the communities born out of the collective negotiation of value, but the Auction Mart was uniquely visible, even to those far removed from London, as a known location for the public sale of real property. The history of London's first purpose-built property marketplace demonstrates how the practice of everyday economic life secured and complicated the idea of a market society. If there was ever to be such a thing as a property market in the abstract, it would be built in this way, from the ground up.

In fact, the cultural visibility of the Auction Mart was so secure by mid-century that it hardly seems to have mattered when it suddenly changed its address, relocating from its original site on Bartholomew Lane to a new building barely a block away in Tokenhouse Yard. The decision to sell the original Auction Mart seems to have reflected the general pressure on City office space in the mid-Victorian period.Footnote ⁸² The board of the original Auction Mart had considered remodeling the building to increase office space in the 1850s, but after receiving two unsolicited bids to purchase the property in 1858 and 1863 (one from an insurance company, the other from a bank), it finally decided to sell in 1864.Footnote ⁸³ Within weeks, the city's auctioneers had formed a new limited liability Auction Mart company which opened a new location three years later, in 1867. The Auction Mart at Tokenhouse Yard was a far less elaborate affair than its predecessor, with more efficient office space, a Saloon reduced to an enlarged entrance hall and a restaurant replacing the old coffee room. The new company did manage to incorporate another major institutional change to the property market, however, when it leased office space to the Estate Exchange—a members-only registry of real estate information that was founded in 1857 and that would eventually inform the development of property market journalism.

In all of this, the Auction Mart retained its reputation as the preeminent marketplace for property. “To-day,” read one report published some time after the opening of the new Auction Mart, “the returns of the sales here transacted [in Tokenhouse Yard] represent a sum never perhaps dreamed of as attainable by the first promoters of the old Auction Mart; and so entirely has the place and its business become a part and parcel of the commercial life of the great City, that ‘Tokenhouse-yard’ is known the whole world over as a notable centre,” or, as another headline put it toward the end of the century, “the Headquarters of the Real Estate Market.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Surely the most telling demonstration of success at Tokenhouse Yard came from the decline of its longtime rival, Garraway's, which changed ownership several times in the 1860s before finally closing in 1873. “Garraway's: the original Auction Mart of London,” announced one advertisement in 1868, underscoring with mordant wit the historic reversal of fortunes of two institutions that had, each in its own way, shaped the commoditization of property in modern England.Footnote ⁸⁵