This article explores the retailing revolution in the eighteenth century with evidence from North-West England. The changing spaces and practices of retailing have received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Reflecting broader analyses of production and consumption, much of this work has emphasised the transformation of retailing from traditionally organised, local and primitive, to large-scale, national integrated and modern systems. Despite growing evidence contradicting the traditional image of eighteenth century shops as primitive and unsophisticated, and of shopping as a mechanical and passive process of acquisition, established orthodoxies die hard, as is evident from the work of Corrigan. He argues that pre-modern shops were ultra-specialised and offered little variety or choice. In the early eighteenth century, Liverpool, England was regarded as a London, England in miniature. It had many new streets and squares, a growing range of cultural infrastructure and a wealthy corporation both willing and able to undertake extensive improvements schemes. As a first step towards a systematic regional analysis, tax records and population data have been used to define the urban and retail hierarchy of the region in the late eighteenth century. In contrasts with earlier interpretations which emphasised the transformations wrought by department stores and multiple retailing in the second half of the nineteenth century, we now seem to find evidence of retail change wherever we look for it.