Commercial Heritage as Democratic Action: Historicizing the 'Save the Market' Campaigns in Bradford and Chesterfield, 1969-76.

This article argues that the traditional retail market-a ubiquitous commercial feature of British towns and cities-produced a particular strand of heritage politics in late 1960s and early 1970s Britain. In recovering the activists involved in two campaigns to 'save the market' from redevelopment-one unsuccessful campaign in Bradford and one successful campaign in Chesterfield-I make the case for thinking through local urban heritage movements in comparative terms, focusing on how place-based citizenship collided with a nascent, national 'anti-development' mood in the early 1970s. The campaigns in Bradford and Chesterfield defended the transhistorical 'publicness' of the retail market-its spatial centrality, its collective ownership, and its relief of town or city rates-as a critique of contemporary, undemocratic privatization of communal space. Combining the archives of civic amenity, community action, and heritage societies with subjective attitudes towards preservation and redevelopment found in local 'letters to the editor' pages, this article reads the market as one physical nexus where local 'politics' and 'publics' collided and permutated in early 1970s provincial Britain. This focus on the lived heritage of socio-economic place has bearing on public history, the history of urban social movements, and architecture and planning historiography.