Historically many goods were sold outdoors by street vendors and before the advent of self-service supermarkets, essential food items such as milk were delivered to people’s homes.

Georgian milk sellers were typically milkmaids who may have milked the cows themselves or collected fresh milk from cow keepers on city outskirts, carrying it into town in pails suspended from yokes. In the 1700s/early 1800s milkmaids wore the working woman’s short ‘bedgown’, low calf-length petticoat (skirt), large white apron and straw or felt hat. Some milkmen also entered towns, wearing the traditional dairyman’s rural smock. From 1864 onwards fresh milk was brought into London by train, and as railway networks took over milk transportation nationwide, so the milk trade developed. Milk despatched from depots was henceforth delivered daily to customers’ homes via horse-drawn vehicles or hand-carts, by smartly-dressed delivery boys in starched white Eton collars or men in bibbed blue aprons. By the 1890s Express Dairy milkmen wore an efficient company uniform comprising white buttoned coat with blue lapels and cuffs and a blue apron. Similarly, during the early 1900s milkmen from large dairies driving floats wore white, blue or beige overall coats with plain or blue and white striped aprons, although there remained considerable variation in dress. Some urban milkmen pushing handcarts through the streets dressed smartly in city suits teamed with apron and bowler hat or cloth cap, while those driving horse-drawn floats in rural areas often wore country breeches or jodhpurs and leather riding boots or gaiters.

Open-air street traders were a familiar sight until the end of the nineteenth century. Some Georgian and Victorian illustrations portrayed street criers as poor and shabbily-dressed, while others favoured a more picturesque image, but all depicted street sellers in the usual male and female workwear of their time. Generally aprons were worn over regular garments, blue and green fabric or sacking aprons being most common with vendors selling animal carcasses. Besides protecting clothes, aprons were also useful for carrying wares, the bibs and upturned apron skirts often used to hold goods ranging from newspapers to fruit. During the 1700s waist belts and sashes were also worn for suspending pouches and receptacles used in the trade, like the itinerant ink-seller’s funnel and measuring jug. Some street sellers hung their goods around their waists, or more commonly strung from a pole. Hawkers (strictly itinerants from the country selling game, poultry, eggs etc.), and vendors of household including clothes-pegs and brooms, collected from the cottages where they were made, sometimes the rural labourer’s smock. Working outdoors in all weather, street traders were never without hat, hood or bonnet.