Wedgwood’s showrooms, too, were something new. Small producer/retailers had combined workshops and selling areas, but it was unusual for a manufacturer of Wedgwood’s size to sell directly to the public. He opened a London showroom in 1768, and he had showrooms in Bath from 1772, and Dublin from 1773.* He saw his showrooms as places of exciting novelty and display, where dinner services were laid out on tables, and
a much greater variety of setts of vases should decorate the Walls, and both these articles may, every few days, be so alter’d, revers’d & transform’d as to render the whole a new scene, even to the same Company, every time they shall bring their friends to visit us.
I need not tell you the many good effects this must produce, when business & amusement can be made to go hand in hand. Every new show, Exhibition or rarity soon grows stale in London, & is no longer regarded, after the first sight, unless utility, or some such variety as I have hinted at above continues to recommend it to their notice…70
But perhaps Wedgwood’s most astute move had nothing to do with selling goods at all. When Wedgwood first set up in business in Burslem, there were three ways for him to send his goods to market: by road for twenty miles, then along the River Weaver to Liverpool; by road for forty miles, to Bridgnorth, then by the River Severn to Bristol; or by road for forty miles, then via the River Trent to Hull. To get one ton of goods from Burslem to the Weaver cost 18s.; from Burslem to the Trent, 34s. Whatever route was chosen, the goods had to make the initial journey by road—and a ‘road’ in the eighteenth century was not what we would call a road. The main road out of Burslem was in such poor condition that it was permanently impassable to wheeled vehicles of any kind; everything had to be carried in and out by packhorse. This was not an unusual state for roads across the country. A contemporary described the road from Knutsford, in Cheshire, to Newcastle under Lyme: ‘In general [it was] a paved causeway, as narrow as can be conceived, and cut into perpetual holes, some of them two feet deep measured on the level…and wherever the country is the least sandy, the pavement [that is, the road surface] is discontinued, and the ruts and holes most execrable.’71 And that was a good road: the road between Newcastle and Burslem was worse, partly because until 1720 the freeholders of Burslem had been entitled to dig clay from any unenclosed land, which included the main roads. In the early nineteenth century much of this had still not been filled in.72 John Ogilby, in his The Traveller’s Guide, or, a Most Exact Description of the Roads of England (1711), had called Burslem one of the most inaccessible places in England. It was hardly surprising that nearly 30 per cent of Wedgwood’s goods were broken in transit.
Wedgwood, as so often, was apparently lucky in being in the right place at the right time. When the novelist and critic Tobias Smollett first travelled to England from Scotland, in 1739, there were no wagons on the roads anywhere between Edinburgh and Newcastle upon Tyne, because there were no roads that were good enough. The roads across the islands were in such a terrible state because their maintenance was still governed by the Highways Act of 1555. This act gave control over the roads to each individual parish, but it did not give parishes the right to levy a rate on residents to pay for professional survey or repair. Instead, those whose land was valued above £50 were required to lend a horse or an ox and a wagon for four days annually, while those householders whose land was rated at a lesser level were required to give four days’ labour on the roads a year, unpaid, to be supervised by an unpaid surveyor. It was unrealistic to expect good work or good materials from those supplying them unrecompensed, and now there was the added unfairness that these locally maintained roads were increasingly used for trans-parish transport between towns and cities. The matter of unpaid labour and co-opted transport was not addressed until the Highways Act of 1835, when finally parishes were permitted to use local rates to pay for professional surveyors and paid labourers. In the meantime, turnpike trusts were created, often formed by groups of manufacturers and local merchants who would most benefit from better-maintained roads. From 1706 individual Turnpike Acts were granted by Parliament: in exchange for improvements and maintenance on the roads for a period of (initially) twenty-one years, each trust could set up toll gates and charge for road usage. The tolls in turn were used to pay for the surveyor, treasurer, clerk and labourers to build the road. Between 1750 and 1800, more than 1,600 trusts were formed;* by the mid-1830s, 1,116 turnpike trusts in England and Wales supervised 22,000 miles of roads, out of a total of 126,770 miles of parish highways. Turnpikes now made up nearly 20 per cent of the road system of England and Wales.74
From the 1740s, Wedgwood had been at the forefront of a successful campaign by a group of Staffordshire merchants and manufacturers to upgrade the roads into the Potteries; in 1766 alone, six Turnpike Acts affecting the Five Towns were approved by Parliament.75 The most immediate result of the spread of turnpikes for these businessmen, however, was not only the improvement to the roads—although now, it was true, goods could actually be transported to and from Burslem by wagon—but the speed with which journeys could be made. From the 1750s to the 1830s journey times between major cities fell by 80 per cent; from the 1770s to the 1830s they were halved. An advertisement in 1754 boasted that ‘However incredible it may appear this coach will actually arrive in London four days after leaving Manchester’; a mere six years later the same distance took three days; by 1784 the time was down to two days. This improvement was not confined to a single road. The trip from Edinburgh to London had been impossible to undertake by carriage along the entire route in 1739; by the mid-1750s the whole route could be covered in a carriage, taking ten days in summer and twelve in winter; in 1836 a stagecoach travelled the route in 451/2 hours.76 In 1820 for the first time in history it became possible for a person to go faster than a man on a single horse.
Travel had become easier; it had it become speedier; now it was more readily available as well. As the journey times fell, so the number of stagecoaches increased: in 1780 there were approximately 20 stagecoaches leaving Birmingham daily; by 1815 there were over 100; in 1835 the number had risen to 350. Ten major urban centres—Birmingham, Bristol, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow and Edinburgh—saw an eightfold increase in stagecoach services in the forty-six years from 1790 to 1836. Even small towns such as Kirkby Stephen, a market town in Westmorland, had regular and plentiful carrier services: from Kirkby Stephen one could