First Published in 1998. This is Volume XV of the eighteen in the Sociology of Work and Organization series and this book on The Shops of Britain follows the author's publication on Retail Trade Associations, a new form of monopolist organization in Britain. After the book had been completed, the Report of the Census of Distribution Committee, published in March 1946, urged the necessity of providing more statistical information about the distributive trades. One of the purposes of this book is to display how complex the structure of retailing is and to show that it is dependent on a great variety of economic, social, occupational and sociological factors which cannot be adequately assessed without a comparative analysis of all the various trades concerned with retailing.