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House names, shop signs and social organization in Western European cities, 1500–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

David Garrioch
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Abstract

The houses in early modern European cities almost all had names and signs. These are usually taken to be an early form of advertising, or else a way of finding one's way around the city in times before street names and numbering. This article argues that their primary purpose was to mark the individual, family or ethnic identity of the house owner or tenant. During the eighteenth century the names and signs changed in character, and by the mid-nineteenth century they had almost disappeared from city centres, primarily as a result of changes in individual and family identity among the urban middle classes, and of the transformation of neighbourhood communities under the pressure of urban economic and social integration. The evolution of house names and shop signs therefore illustrates the changing relationship between the city's residents and the urban environment.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , April 1994 , pp. 20 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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Footnotes

*

I would particularly like to thank Patricia Naish and the inter-library loan staff of the Monash University Library for invaluable assistance in tracking down the elusive literature on shop signs. Versions of this paper were presented to the History Department, Monash University, to the Eleventh Conference of Australasian Historians of Medieval and Early Modern Europe, and to the Sixth Biennial Conference of the Australian Historical Association. I am very grateful for the comments and suggestions I received on these occasions. I would also like to thank Wallace Kirsop, Bill Kent and Marian Aveling for numerous references and suggestions.

References

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2 In London the signs were apparently purely pictorial until at least the late seventeenth century: Phythian-Adams, C., ‘Milk and soot. The changing vocabulary of a popular ritual in Stuart and Hanoverian London’, in Fraser, D. and Sutcliffe, A. (eds), The Pursuit of Urban History (London, 1983), 84.Google Scholar

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