Blending Public and Private : British Municipal Trading c. 1889-1975

Municipal trading was the dominant delivery form for transport and utility services in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain and saw local authorities operate these services on a profit-making basis. This paper uses historical evidence and the ideas of contemporary theorists of municipal trading to demonstrate how these bodies formatively brought hybridity into the public sector, using blended public, corporate and market institutional orders. It demonstrates that in order to gain institutional legitimacy for municipal trading local authorities had to fall back on antecedents in the transport and infrastructure industries, notably in the turnpike trusts, canal and railway industries.