Arcade

It is the arcades of early twentieth-century Paris that are the most familiar to scholars in urban studies because of the work of critical theorist Walter Benjamin and surrealist writers such as Louis Aragon and André Breton. This entry, however, focuses on the arcades of London.

Arcades arguably originated in London in the sixteenth century as the sites of financial exchange and trade. Adopting a spatial arrangement from Italian mercantile cities where the financial exchange of bankers took place in arcaded courtyards, the Royal Exchange, built in 1568, consisted of a two-story gallery around an open courtyard. In 1609 a rival, the New Exchange, was built farther west in the Strand, internalizing the courtyard and placing an arcaded walk around the outside, two rows of shops and a central corridor on the ground floor, and three rows of shops on the upper floor. The New Exchange and those that followed, such as the Exeter Change (1676) and the Middle Exchange, were located to the west of the city, their intended customers initially the nobility traveling west from their residences.

By siting trade internally and rationalizing the layout of booths, these commodity exchanges sanitized and regulated the market place, making it acceptable to a new bourgeois class, providing fancy goods—perfumes and clothes rather than the food products of traditional markets. The bazaar, a multistory building containing shopping stalls or counters, as well as picture galleries, indoor gardens, and menageries, by using a name that evoked the exotic qualities of the merchandise, took the process of commodification one stage further. Under the management of one proprietor, counters were rented out to retailers of different trades, attracting customers to a wider variety of commodities—dresses, accessories, millinery.

Precedents for English arcades also came from France, from the Jardins du Palais Royal (1781– 1786), a quadrangle with an arcaded ground floor and shops along one side, described as the prototype of the prerevolutionary Parisian arcade, a meeting place for wealthy society prerevolution and post-revolution, converted into shops. The first arcades, places of transition as well as exchange, such as the Galleries du Bois, the Passage Feydeau (1791), and the Passage du Caire (1797–1799), followed shortly afterward. The first two arcades constructed during the early decades of the nineteenth century in London were the Royal Opera Arcade (1815–1817), designed by John Nash and G. S. Repton, and the Burlington Arcade (1818–1819), designed by Samuel Ware. A third London arcade, the Lowther Arcade, was also part of an urban improvement scheme around Trafalgar Square. The London arcades were part of plans to promote the fashionable and wealthy residential areas of the west around Piccadilly, Bond Street, Oxford Street, and Regent Street as a zone of luxury commodity consumption.

The Burlington Arcade was built for Lord Cavendish, the owner of Burlington House, to create a private realm, protected from the street, for an elite class of shopper. Arcades were represented as safe environments, usually under the management of one proprietor, physically secure with safety features, such as guards and lockable gates. Designed along strict and rational grids, with no hidden spaces or secret activities, these buildings [Page 34]promoted order and control. From the outset, entry to the arcade was moderated; members of Lord Cavendish's ex-military regiment were employed as beadles to guard entry to the arcade and to enforce certain regulations. These governed opening and closing times (the arcade closed at 8 p.m. and was locked at night); the kind of movement that could take place in the arcade (this excluded running, pushing a pram, and carrying bulky packages or open umbrellas); and the noise level in the arcade (there was to be no whistling, singing, or playing of musical instruments). In contrast to the surrounding unruly city, associated with danger and threat, emphasis was placed on order and control. The status of the arcade was clearly indicated to passersby at the point of entry, the threshold with the street, where the presence of the beadles and the colonnaded screens indicated a transition from the unruly and public to the ordered and private.

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