Barcelona Metropolis

In La gent del carrer Montcada [The People of Montcada Street], Albert Garcia Espuche reflects five hundred years of life on one of Barcelona’s most iconic streets. The author paints a picture of daily life in a neighbourhood of working-class women and tradesmen, a quasi-poetic account of ancient streets that tell stories that belong to us too.

La gent del carrer Montcada. Una història de Barcelona (segles XIII a XVIII), by Albert Garcia Espuche (2020), edited by Barcelona City Council in two volumes, comprising 475 and 725 pages respectively, is one of the few books that may be considered “a life’s work” because devoting an entire academic career to pursuing a project of this magnitude was in fact necessary. Garcia Espuche, who had already thoroughly documented the everyday lives of the residents of the El Born neighbourhood and the city’s trades in 1700, now bestows us with a comprehensive publication that covers five hundred years of life on one of the city’s most iconic streets, Carrer Montcada.

The rustling of robes, the babble of gossip and the whirr of small lives that become immense are reflected by Garcia Espuche with a love and a finesse that are exuded by the painstaking description of the household trousseaus and of the possessions of the various owners, who, century after century, occupied the various houses on the street. The archival documentation that is unearthed allows us to chart an almost poetic and accurate micro-history as it corresponds to a work of profound ambition. Thus we see the birth of workshops like the one that Jaume Codina, in 1530, had at home: “una fabrica o obratge de llanes per fer draps contrays, mescolats, setzens, vernins [teles fines], per la qual fabrica e obra tenia en casa llogats per majordom de dita llana e fabrica lo senyor Lluís Rossell, paraire” (vol. II, p. 466) and also painful deaths or uncertain journeys.

Everyone with a penchant for urban planning knows that there are three books on the philosophical history of cities that are, as they say in France, incontournables [indispensable]. La Cité antique [The Ancient City] by Fustel de Coulanges (1864), The City in History by Lewis Munford (1961), and Passages by Walter Benjamin (1927-1942, 1^st ed., 1982) have taught us that cities, although they bring about unprecedented phenomena, are also a continuation and recreation of their past. The ancient streets tell us stories that are also ours. Citizen territories are united, beyond the centuries, by a civilising thread that binds us to the past but that, inevitably, is absolutely provisional in bourgeois society.

The streets are home to, often reluctantly, masters and serfs, owners and the dispossessed, ordinary people and outsiders, in daily ups and downs and in a confused jumble of signs almost imperceptible to whoever is found there. But placed under the eyes of the historian, and with the perspective of centuries, the amalgam takes on a magnificent meaning and hue. As Walter Benjamin wrote in A Berlin Chronicle: “He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... For the “matter itself” is no more than the strata which yield their long-sought secrets only to the most meticulous investigation.” Garcia Espuche’s book makes it impossible to continue sustaining the myth of a Montcada street of aristocrats and large mansions, and portrays it spilling over with working-class women and tradesmen, with periods of ostentation and bleakness. Today, Carrer Montcada is a street taken over by tourists and, largely, toned down, as the Old City of Barcelona has been watered down and “sanitised”, for better or worse, for the last century since the Via Laietana thoroughfare opened. But La gent del carrer Montcada by Garcia Espuche will continue to be an impressive historiographical monument in commemoration of, and tribute to, working-class Barcelona.