Street Food

Hawkers and the History of London
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-0-19-284694-5
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Format (B × H): 159 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 557 g

This is the story of the women, men, boys, and girls who hawked oysters, cherries, cabbages, and pies on London's streets, feeding the capital throughout its transformation from medieval city to global metropolis.

Street Food reconstructs the working lives of these poor traders, following them from the back alleys and cramped rooms they called home, to the taverns, bridges, and corners where they set up shop. It describes fast-moving food chains, heaving markets, rumbling wheelbarrows, scruffy donkeys, rushing traffic, and advertising cries that echoed through the city. The first long-term, comprehensive history of street selling in London, the book explores the intricacies of hawkers' work and their profound social, economic, and cultural importance to metropolitan life between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on the largest collection of archival and published evidence to date, it not only highlights the crucial roles street sellers played in fuelling the capital's expansion, but argues that their endurance over three centuries raises challenging questions about major narratives and processes of urban history, like modernization, the rise of retail, and the improvement of the streets. And it examines why the street food of the past-like the continuing vitality of street vendors around the world - is so different to the fashionable street food ubiquitous across London today.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Taverner, Charlie

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Sachkultur, Materielle Kultur
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte

Über Autor(innen)

Charlie Taverner is a social historian of food and cities. After receiving a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, he held an Economic History Society postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research. He is currently a research fellow on the ERC-funded FoodCult project, based at Trinity College Dublin. His research has appeared in journals such as History Workshop and Urban History. Previously, Charlie worked as a business and agricultural journalist, starting out on the staff of the magazine Farmers Weekly.