The structure and development of commercial gardening businesses in Fulham and Hammersmith, Middlesex, c. 1680-1861..
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation responds to Joan Thirsk’s call for historians to undertake a closer investigation of commercial gardening. It adopts a micro-historical approach, to address two questions, ‘What was a gardener?’, and ‘What was a garden business?’’ Based in the parish of Fulham (including the hamlet of Hammersmith), Middlesex, the parish with the largest acreage of commercial gardening in England in 1796, the study applies nominal linkage to a variety of sources to understand more fully the gardeners, garden businesses, and gardening families between 1680 and 1861. The dissertation exploits sources with occupational descriptors, including livery company apprentice registers, bankruptcies and insolvencies, clandestine marriage registers, Bank of England accounts, and fire insurance policies, not used previously for a statistical examination of gardening. Quantitative data are set in a rich context using qualitative sources such as newspapers, Old Bailey proceedings and property surveys. Tracing occupational terms through the sources shows that records created by parish and government bodies relied on a few customary terms, each encompassing several different functions in gardening, for much longer than commercial documents, demonstrating how reliance on one source can be misleading. In this study I argue that occupational descriptors in gardening reflected the focus, but failed to capture the entirety, of what was produced in a garden business. From the early eighteenth century garden businesses should not be viewed simply as a market garden or nursery; they cultivated a diversity of horticultural products, but are also found to have had a variety of other agricultural interests and economic pursuits, introducing new products and responding to new opportunities: gardeners did not only garden. Contrary to the claims of some historians this was not just an early phase in the transition from agriculture to specialist gardening but persisted into the nineteenth century. …
abstract: This dissertation responds to Joan Thirsk’s call for historians to undertake a closer investigation of commercial gardening. It adopts a micro-historical approach, to address two questions, ‘What was a gardener?’, and ‘What was a garden business?’’ Based in the parish of Fulham (including the hamlet of Hammersmith), Middlesex, the parish with the largest acreage of commercial gardening in England in 1796, the study applies nominal linkage to a variety of sources to understand more fully the gardeners, garden businesses, and gardening families between 1680 and 1861. The dissertation exploits sources with occupational descriptors, including livery company apprentice registers, bankruptcies and insolvencies, clandestine marriage registers, Bank of England accounts, and fire insurance policies, not used previously for a statistical examination of gardening. Quantitative data are set in a rich context using qualitative sources such as newspapers, Old Bailey proceedings and property surveys. Tracing occupational terms through the sources shows that records created by parish and government bodies relied on a few customary terms, each encompassing several different functions in gardening, for much longer than commercial documents, demonstrating how reliance on one source can be misleading. In this study I argue that occupational descriptors in gardening reflected the focus, but failed to capture the entirety, of what was produced in a garden business. From the early eighteenth century garden businesses should not be viewed simply as a market garden or nursery; they cultivated a diversity of horticultural products, but are also found to have had a variety of other agricultural interests and economic pursuits, introducing new products and responding to new opportunities: gardeners did not only garden. Contrary to the claims of some historians this was not just an early phase in the transition from agriculture to specialist gardening but persisted into the nineteenth century. …
author: Rough, Barbara Anne
language: en
keywords: market gardens, agriculture, Fulham and Hammersmith, garden business, nurseries, gardener, nurseryman, women in business
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/9e5e8b90-a787-47df-b58d-a8de3b0ca4aa/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2018-10-20
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:32Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.30234