Continuity and Change in Consumer Behaviour

I have the great good fortune to have [modest] homes in Wapping and in Bakewell.

Bakewell has been a tourist destination since before Jane Austen visited, and made its main hotel the setting for the reconciling encounter between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy. With the growth of urban centres, the Peak District became surrounded by major industrial cities, market towns and mining villages; and despite the Thatcherite destruction of much of the former employment, there are still over four million people who live within one hour's travelling time of Bakewell [which is pretty central to the Peak]. Since the days of charabancs, the number who walk or cycle from Sheffield, Manchester and Derby have been massively exceeded by those who come on buses and coaches, and in family cars, to enjoy the beauty of the countryside, the variety of the shops, the delightful interests of the Monday market and - bizarrely - to eat chips by the river bank. With the chips, some eat fish, or fishcakes [Yorkshire or Derbyshire style], jumbo sausages or pies and - latterly - deep-fried Mars bars: but many just eat chips, and reminisce about doing the same thing decades previously with their parents and grandparents. Whatever exotic holidays or pastimes the family members may have been able to afford, they retain an affection for the location of childhood memories; sufficiently to keep two chip shops busy. Especially on Bank Holiday weekends, the town centre literally smells of chips. There are several good restaurants in the town, including two pubs that have moved upmarket; but that burgeoning alternative has not dented the traditionalist demand for 'open' chips to be consumed in the open air [and, disastrously for the wildlife] shared with the ducks and the geese. This is thus an example of a consumer tradition being continued through the generations.

Wapping has recently become a 'destination', partly driven by the mounting of major events at Tobacco Dock, partly derived from the increasing success of the establishments around St Katherine Docks, and greatly facilitated by the opening a few years ago of the East London Line as an integrated component of London Overground. Saint Katherine's  is only a few dozen yards from Tower Hill Station and is immediately adjacent to Tower Bridge; and direct lines from Wapping station now go to Croydon, Crystal Palace, Highbury and Islington and Clapham Junction. Thus people from much of London can easily get to Wapping; but why should they? Unlike the South Bank, the north bank of the river, especially at Wapping and Limehouse, is largely inaccessible to visitors. Except for the listed St Peter's church, there is nothing to draw the visitor into the centre of Wapping; where there are just [excellent] family shops and five pubs, four of which are not designed or geared-up to take the tidal waves of one-time visitors who now appear in them. The one pub that is set up to take the tourists is the Prospect of Whitby, which is known by name to millions of people, and features in family anecdotes as the place where young men [and occasionally women] in the dark ages when the London Docks were open could more-or-less safely go to see the rough edges of east end life. Wapping has become gentrified, and the riverside is now almost completely given over to expensive apartments, some in former warehouses and others in buildings made to look vaguely like old warehouses [and called after the former wharves that stood on the site]. Two modern restaurants - an Italian establishment from the 'nineties, and a fish restaurant from the noughties - have both attracted trade from far afield; but the sort of people who crowd the pubs, especially on sunny Saturdays and Sundays are a very different clientele from those who are attracted to the restaurants. The cool wind and the rain yesterday did not deter many hundreds of people from cramming in to the riverside pubs; from which the once-familiar faces of surviving 'old Wappingers' have disappeared. This change has been accelerating for five years, but this year it has become almost overwhelming. Where these people come from, and why, is a modern mystery: a consumer phenomenon.

Perspective

I am lucky to have two homes in England; one a flat in Wapping with outlook to the Thames just east of Tower Bridge, and the other in the middle of Bakewell, which is one of the nicest little towns in the country.

I moved job, from Sheffield to London - and from academic life to a professional institute - in 1989, and have been in Wapping ever since. In 1986 I acquired a home in the Peak District, just outside Bakewell, and have retained my connection with the area ever since, Both homes are fully equipped, so I travel between the two with only a briefcase.

Both communities, Wapping and Bakewell, have experienced significant demographic change over the past three decades; and I have been privileged to live through the changes in both places. Both have seen a significant breakdown of multi-generational  indigenous British families. In Wapping, as the former warehouses became expensive flats and as more new-build luxury apartments were constructed, so the prices of former council flats that had been sold to private buyers also rose dramatically. The construction of the Canary Wharf complex to the east of Wapping meant that the former London Docks area became a highly desirable base for living [at least on weekdays] equidistant from the City and Canary Wharf. Old dockers [and their wives] who had not moved east to Dagenham or Buckhurst Hill have mostly died. Almost all their children and grandchildren live outside London, even though a very large proportion of them still work in London. In the 'eighties and early 'nineties, an incomer to Wapping [still a relatively rare beast], who used the local shops, pubs and church was quickly accepted into conversations; and I was astonished within a few weeks to encounter people in the street [whom I did not recognise] greeting me with a cheery "'allo, Dave!"
The survivors from among those 'old Wappiners' still greet me, and I able to return the salutation to them, but it is an increasingly rare phenomenon: though it still happens on a daily basis.

While it was possible, before the millennium, to predict with considerable accuracy who would be in each pub  in Wapping, and thus what the conversation would be; and often to look forward to it; that entire scene has changed, One pub has opened - the Captain Kidd, with a wonderful riverside beer garden - and four have closed: the Scots Arms,the China Ship, 'Bullins' aka the Three Swedish Crowns and the Jolly Sailor. Only in two of the surviving pubs is there anything like a traditional bar-room conversation, and that only occasionally. The excellent butchers and bakers shops are at least as busy as ever, but with a new clientele, Most of the pubs thrive on catering and on Wapping becoming something of a 'destination' thanks to the excellent upgrade of the Overground East London Line and to events at Tobacco Dock. Wapping is wealthier and more orderly than at any time in its history: but the docklands character that I was privileged to see [albeit two decades after the docks closed] has entirely gone.

Bakewell has undergone similar changes in the same period. It is much more intensively a residential town, with a large population of reasonably affluent pensioners. Almost all the pupils from the outstanding Lady Manners school who go into further and higher education make their careers outside the Peak. Employment opportunity for other under twenty-fives is limited to the council, the cattle market, the shops and the pubs. Shops and pubs are focused on the millions of visits to the town that are made by the millions of people who live within a day-visit distance of Bakewell in greater Manchester, Sheffield, Chesterfield, Nottinghamshire, Leicester, Derby and Staffordshire. Local residents can use the facilities, at the prices that are set for the tourist market - and many do, within budgetary limits -but they also travel to Chesterfield, Sheffield or Derby for competitive prices. Most of the pubs are now good quality restaurants: though a couple of them still welcome conversing local non-diners. Like Wapping, Bakewell is more affluent and orderly than ever in its past.

Wapping without the docks is a purposeless place where it is good to live; and so is Bakewell. Most of the locals who are to be seen about Bakewell are not farmers or engineers [which were the trades on which the town thrived in past centuries] but employees in the service sector. The place is prettier than ever, but the spirit is infinitely weaker.