A Petit Bourgeois Urban Social Movement? The Case of Britain’s National Union of Small Shopkeepers

This contribution examines a curious protest movement of small shopkeepers in Britain from the 1940s to the 1980s—the National Union of Small Shopkeepers—and considers whether it makes sense to think of this group as a distinctive petit bourgeois form of urban social movement. The NUSS was formed to contest the declining social and economic position of small shopkeepers within post-war towns and cities. The movement was especially concerned with the effect of urban renewal, slum clearance, and redevelopment, which tended to have a deleterious effect on small business in much the same way as contemporary gentrification processes. This contestation of urban politics and planning placed the National Union of Small Shopkeepers in the same terrain as leftist urban social movements, and yet the movement retained a distinctive petit bourgeois ideological character that was manifested in anti-labourism, libertarianism, and reactionary nationalist currents of thought. The British NUSS drew repeated comparisons with Poujadism in France for these reasons. The chapter surveys the position and the politics of small shopkeepers within Britain across the period, and explores the National Union of Small Shopkeepers’ activities and strategy. Overall, it shows that—while the NUSS did possess many characteristics of a Castellian urban social movement, especially in its earlier years—ultimately its specific ideological character militated against the formation of wider cross-class sympathies. Over time, the specifically urban aspects of the shopkeepers’ movement faded and the organisation thus became progressively less like an urban social movement as the period wore on. The unusual case study is thus useful to probe the definitional boundaries of the urban social movement concept as well as to explore questions of ideology more closely.