Consumption is not a new topic for historians of eighteenth-century Britain. However, whilst those studying the period have been keen to explore the nature of consumerism from many different standpoints and using a variety of approaches, they have been less likely – in contrast to those working on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – to utilize the theoretical approaches of modernist and post-modernist thinkers such as Veblen, Benjamin and Bourdieu. In many ways this is not surprising, since these writers explicitly equated consumption with modernity and post-modernity in ways that many scholars of the eighteenth century would not automatically identify as helpful. Historians of eighteenth-century shops and shopkeeping, in particular, have tended to shy away from complex theoretical analyses and to produce work that is overwhelmingly empirical and in which the relationships between leisure practices and consumption remain largely unexplored. There is thus nothing on this earlier period to match the outpouring of work on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century department store, for example. The authors of Spaces of Consumption aim to provide some counterbalance here, and to further the understanding of the complex inter-relationships between consumption, leisure and the social and material spaces in which they took place in eighteenth-century England.

As its title suggests, space is a particularly important concept in this book. This is apparent in the ordering of its chapters, which move from the region to the individual via town, street and building, with a chapter at the end on the imagined space of the advertisement. Stobart, Hann and Morgan seek to explore the ways in which space and practice were related at a variety of levels, and to investigate the different imperatives that surfaced at each geographical scale. ‘Moving down through a series of geographical scales’, they argue, ‘allows us to deconstruct the spatiality of urban consumption, whilst retaining the notion that consumer spaces were at once layered and discrete’ (p. 2). The book focuses on the north-west of England and the west midlands. It argues that the hearts of towns such as Warrington, Birmingham, Stafford and Stockport were transformed into consumer landscapes and that whilst traditional values, customs and activities persisted, ‘polite’ consumer practices increasingly dominated. Although aristocrats and the gentry do figure in the pages of Spaces of Consumption, this is largely a book about the middling sort, both as consumers, and as the purveyors of goods.

Stobart, Hann and Morgan cover a long period and examine a great number and variety of towns in this study. The range of source materials utilized – from directories and urban histories to shopkeepers' accounts and diaries – is impressive and shows the authors to be as interested in empiricism as they are in sociological theory. However, the thematic organization of the book – whilst interesting in many respects – does mean that the pictures painted of the differing geographical scales of investigation can appear rather undifferentiated in some respects, with examples often seemingly cited at random and ranging widely between locations and across time. The result is a strangely static picture of the dynamic processes of urbanization and the growth of consumer culture in this period. The reader is also not helped to understand the nature of the complex variety of individual examples cited owing to a lack of footnoting on the page and a surprising paucity of street maps, even when the book involves quite complex discussions of town planning and the organization of streets. Both of these factors were presumably driven by the demands of the publisher rather than the authors. Despite such caveats, Spaces of Consumption sheds important new light on a crucial aspect of eighteenth-century culture and will be required reading for all historians of consumption and urban society in eighteenth-century England.