A wealth of new luxury shops sprang up in Bristol in the 1700s.

While for most people shopping involved visiting local markets for food, the rising population and the prosperity of Bristol meant that there was now a growing demand for upmarket goods.

Merchandise usually copied the capital's trends and fashions causing one newspaper reporter to describe Bristol as having 'The London Itch'. The way to shop was also copied and Bristol's Upper and Lower Arcades opened in 1825, six years after London's Burlington Arcade, Britain's first covered shopping street.

The arcades changed the shopping landscape of the city and gave upper-class women somewhere to shop for new luxury goods, undisturbed by the dirt and noise outside.

An anonymous poet in the 1820s wrote of how ladies could shop in the arcade protected from

... pollution from the contact close

of sooty SWEEP - or brawny Porter, who,

Replete with insolence, rush often by

Unceremonious, rudely jostling those

Who pass them