City, Culture and Society 1 (2010) 69–77

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City, Culture and Society

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The translocal street: Shop signs and local multi-culture alongthe Walworth Road, south London

Suzanne Hall ⇑, Ayona DattaCities Programme, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords:Translocal

MobilitySituatedEmplacedVisual Signage

1877-9166/$ - see front matter � 2010 Elsevier Ltd. Adoi:10.1016/j.ccs.2010.08.001

⇑ Corresponding author.E-mail address: s.m.hall@lse.ac.uk (S. Hall).

In this paper, we look at the different ways that visual signscapes along an inner London street producesparticular types of translocal connections to different spaces and places that are physically distanciatedyet symbolically proximate. We are particularly interested in examining these signscapes for the waysthat they evoke particular connections between migrant entrepreneurs and a diverse clientele, betweenthe colonial pasts and postcolonial presents, between the ordinary and the global city, and betweeneveryday livelihoods and economic exchanges. We suggest that these signscapes are translocal since theyevoke material and embodied links between the street and its neighbourhoods, while at the same timeconnecting the street to a wider spatial network of routes/roots which the migrant entrepreneurs havetaken to establish their livelihoods on the street. Thus the Walworth Road, a place where a multiplicityof connections are made between different places through these signs, becomes the node or location ofparticular types of mobility and migration undertaken by migrants and their clients. It becomes a trans-local street as it situates mobile actors and identities within the physical and social forms of economicexchange, shop front displays and signage. The local ‘multi-culture’ on this street is made and remadethrough these particular connections which are material, embodied, everyday and ordinary.

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Introduction

Numeric descriptions of London’s population growth anddiversification since 2000 underscore the recent growth ofthe city as one predominantly populated by individualswho were born outside of the UK. National census data re-veal that in 2001, 53% of all ethnic minority groups livingin the UK resided in London (Hamnett 2003), indicating thatdemographic heterogeneity in the UK is primarily an urbanphenomenon, moreover, one concentrated in London (Officeof National Statistics 2001 http://www.statistics.gov.uk).Recent population survey estimates highlight the effects ofmigrations into London between 1998 and 2008: inner Lon-don’s population has grown faster than outer London’s pop-ulation; migration occurs primarily from internationalflows; since 2004 there has been a surge in short-term mi-grants from the eight EU accession states in Eastern Europe;and, essentially, the high ethnic diversity levels in Londonare increasing (Greater London Authority 2008). What theofficial format of these statistical measures cannot address

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are the questions of how the impacts of urban change areexperienced and in what ways cultural and ethnic diversityis manifested in the spaces of the city. However acute thesenumeric descriptions are, they do little to render a complexor fine-grained explanation of the everyday practices ofmobility as situated within local places.

This paper examines the ‘translocal geographies’ (Brick-ell & Datta 2010) of migrant entrepreneurs in an inner Lon-don shopping street through their shop front displays.Specifically we explore how visual signscapes, or the cho-reographed arrangements of urban surfaces and spaces byproprietors along a south London street, provide a mediumfor individuals to negotiate differences. The Walworth Roadin the London Borough of Southwark is a linear, cheek-by-jowl collection of workplaces and social spaces that are partof local life. The street runs adjacent to a series of largescale social housing estates, including the Heygate andAylesbury Estates, and draws on a population of approxi-mately 12,000 residents and 3,000 employees within com-fortable walking distance of the street (CABE 2007). Theclose association of work and local life on the streetemerges through the activities of people walking, shopping,going to school, collecting a social benefits cheque, or wait-

70 S. Hall, A. Datta / City, Culture and Society 1 (2010) 69–77

ing for the bus on the one hand and the adjacent activitiesof making and selling on the other. Walworth Road there-fore provides a fertile analytic territory to explore experi-ences of emplaced mobilities, the complex overlapsbetween transnational and translocal identities, and thereworking of social differences. We focus explicitly on theeveryday life of the street through the arrangement of shopfront displays to suggest how transnational mobilities ofdiverse proprietors produce London as an ‘ordinary city’(Robinson 2006).

The empirical context of this paper is part of a larger eth-nographic research on the production and negotiation oflivelihoods on Walworth Road, conducted between 2006and 2008 (Hall 2009). In this paper we focus on a photo-graphic analysis of the shop front signs of over 200 shopsalong the street, while drawing upon a wider face-to-facesurvey conducted with 128 of the independent proprietors.We explore the forms of expressions that emerge out of acombination of cultural affinities and entrepreneurial acu-men on the part of the proprietors. Through observing theimaginative displays of language and objects in the inde-pendent shops, we focus on how connections are made be-tween the spaces and places along transnational migrantroutes to Walworth Road. In closing we ask, what are thespatial implications in examining situated mobilitiesthrough the everyday practices of visually communicationenacted by proprietors of shops along Walworth Road?

Translocal geographies of the Walworth Road

In order to understand the shopfront displays of theWalworth Road, we situate this within a notion of ‘em-placed mobilities’ (Smith, 2001) of those who occupy theseshops – an intersection of both established residents, andimmigrants who come from particular colonial and post-colonial spaces of the former British Empire. We suggestthat these images refer to translocal connections betweendifferent spaces across the globe which are evoked withinand beyond transnational connections. In recent years, aproliferation of debates has emerged around the formationof transnational or diasporic identities among those whomigrate across national territories. While it is accepted thatsuch identities are inherently fluid and incorporate multi-ple sites of affiliation, the nation-state often remains theprimary point of reference through which they are exam-ined. Further, scholars such as Appadurai (1996, 2005)and Hannerz (1996) suggest that heightened movementand mobility produces a notion of deterritorialisation anddisembeddedness from places. While pre-existing notionsof transnationalism retain the nation and national territo-ries as its predominant focus, they appear to suggest asense of dislocation from place.

On the other hand, critiques from scholars such as Mi-chael Peter Smith (2001) suggest that despite migrants’transnational loyalties, there is a heightened sense of com-mitment within their immediate local contexts. Throughthe images presented in this paper, we concur with Smithto suggest that situatedness in migrants’ lives continuesto be of crucial significance despite increased global mobil-ity. We are not arguing for an anthropological sense ofplace as a bounded locale (as critiqued by Appadurai), buta rethinking of local places as dynamic sites where transna-

tional, translocal, and diasporic identities are expressedand explored.

The images in this paper suggest a production of ‘Trans-local geographies’ (Brickell & Datta 2010) – the notion thattransnational mobility does not in any way reduce theimportance of locales but rather produces particular artic-ulations of ‘situatedness’ which are not limited, as Oakesand Schein (2006) acknowledge, to one specific context orone place identity. Within the street locale, references aremade to varieties of sites, locations, and spatialities withinand beyond the nation-state, while remaining groundedwithin everyday power structures and the agencies of ac-tors in transforming the conditions of their own mobility.Following Brickell and Datta (2010) we argue that thetranslocal geographies of the Walworth Road include arange of mobilities across interconnected spatial scales –homes, neighbourhoods, cities, and regions – betweenand across different scales of locality.

In this paper we take the scale of the neighbourhood asour empirical context, but we are not limited by its spatialboundedness. A key quality of an inner-London street isthat it is central to the everyday livelihoods of an urbanneighbourhood, but it also extends past the area, linkingit to other places and spaces. An urban high street situatesand connects, both focusing and expanding the possibilitiesfor contact between different people. A local resident aptlydescribed the Walworth Road as ‘basically a road betweenother places’. This key quality of being between provides acrucial direction for this exploration, capturing a spatiallocation neither at the centre nor the margins of contempo-rary London. In addition being ‘in-between’ refers to a cul-tural location neither captured by a static view of theremnants of Walworth’s working-class residents based onlocation or community, nor a segregated view of its ethnicminorities based on origin or race. The in-between invokesthe experience, time and place of urban cultures engaged inthe context of deep change. Connections to other spacesand places are central to the understanding of differenceon this street, and although the Walworth Road is a placeof local particularities, its local world is integrally con-nected to the forces of significant urban and global mobil-ity. The street is positioned between central London andCamberwell, between the modernist urban ambitions andpost-war regeneration of the twentieth century, betweenglobal and post-colonial worlds, and between white work-ing-class traditions and diverse, transnational cultures inclose physical proximity.

Walworth Road is translocal in yet another way: whilethe Walworth Road is a high street, it is also a route be-tween local urban neighbourhoods. It is supported by resi-dents living within a convenient walking distance of thestreet and a broader group of people who reach the streetby way of other journeys. Some of these journeys are partof the daily or weekly routines of commute common toLondoners. Other journeys to the Walworth Road involvea distinctive break with the regularity and comfort of afamiliar world; these are the migratory journeys from onecountry to another, and require traversing great distances.To travel these actual and perceptual distances, is to crossthe boundaries between the familiar and unfamiliar, anddemands particular social and cultural skills. The capacityto engage in difference and change requires an ability to

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live with more than one sense of a local or familiar place – a‘here’ as well as a ‘there’, and a ‘then’ as well as a ‘now’ –and the ability to live amongst different people. The tran-slocality of Walworth Road then is also produced throughmundane everyday exchanges across spaces and placesthat do not easily fit within the transnational analyticframe. These everyday exchanges are at the scale of theneighbourhood and incorporate more corporeal andembodied exchanges of physical movement similar to butnot the same as mobilities across real and imagined trans-national spaces.

We therefore situate the shop fronts of these differententrepreneurs within/across particular ‘locales’ reflectingthe combination of multiple territories and cultural refer-ence points that the shop signs refer to. We are interestedin how ‘situated yet mobile identities’ (Smith 2005) arearticulated through the everyday organisation of shopfronts that draw on connections across regional, national,or global spaces. These images problematise the construc-tion of the migrant as ‘in here but still there’, suggesting in-stead that migrants have varied loyalties to different placesand these loyalties are constructed through complex nego-tiations with these places. The everyday practice of arrang-ing these shop fronts to display goods and to communicatewith a variegated clientele suggests the interconnectednessbetween the material and metaphorical contexts of differ-ent spaces on the migrant routes and suggest a fluidityand variability of scales of reference that problematises na-tional identities. They suggest a far more complex inter-mingling of a multitude of local worlds on the WalworthRoad: a shared terrain in which diverse references to hu-mour, cultural symbols, aspirational objects and basicneeds are collaged.

The connections between the Walworth Road and theadjacent neighbourhoods suggest another possibility forviewing and understanding the visual signscapes. The Wal-worth Road is both an aggregation of small, independentshops as well as a collection of individual imaginations,agilities and acumen that play a role in how the smallspaces of the city are shaped and transformed. It is there-fore translocal through the basic economic ways that mi-grant entrepreneurs are attempting to improve their livesand livelihoods in the city. It forms a site of accumulationand negotiation of varieties of social, economic and culturalcapital (Bourdieu 2002). The visual signscapes can be seenas part of this negotiation, where their very visible aspect ofeconomic capital can be exchanged for other forms of socialand cultural capital at a later time. In order to operate aseffective entrepreneurs, shop proprietors have to learnhow to exchange between these different forms of capital.They operate therefore within what Bourdieu would argueas a ‘field of meaning’ through which their position andcapital can be strengthened. The visual signscapes there-fore are also forms of visual capital, which can be ex-changed for particular economic capital if they are able toattract the right clientele into these shops.

These visual signscapes make multiple connections tothe different social spaces of their clientele and give valueand meanings to the products sold in these particularshops. They situate these connections between particularnodes of economic exchanges and produce particular waysof understanding and translating these in the context of

mobility and social change in the neighbourhood. Under-standing these signscapes as translocal means that we takeinto account the fields of meanings that they refer to – sug-gesting that these signages are not necessarily ‘rationalchoice’ but ways of transcending the divisions betweenstructure and agency and proposing a ‘theory of practicein which actions are both constrained by but at the sametime constitutive of a deeper structure’ (Kelly & Lusis2006: 832).

The distribution and valuation of capital through visualsignscapes on the Walworth Road, and its possibilities ofexchange is not objective, but actors on the street are ableto quickly learn the ‘rules of the game’ (Bourdieu 2002) thatare implicitly agreed upon. As visual forms of cultural cap-ital, they can be translated into social capital through thedevelopment of a social network base of valued customersand therefore exchanged for economic capital through theirpatronage. A key feature of these signages is that they arecontingent upon the particular context of the WalworthRoad where they are read, interpreted and translatedthrough a particular combination of social, cultural andeconomic capital vested in both entrepreneurs and clients.These signscapes are neither deterministic in fixing identi-ties and spaces, nor inhibited individual choice in their ref-erences – but a carefully crafted negotiation between thestructure and agency of everyday livelihoods on an ordin-ary retail street in south London.

The focus in this paper then is on these combinations ofsocial, cultural and economic capital, which produce differ-ent kinds of visual expression along a multicultural street.

Unpacking the multi-lingual signscape of WalworthRoad

Our first visual representation of the Walworth Road tothe reader is by way of a plan of the Walworth Road paral-leled with a map of the world (Fig. 1). Connections betweenthe small spaces along the street to cities across the worldare traced by linking the origins of the proprietors to theirrespective independent shops along the Walworth Road. Bywalking the Walworth Road over a two-week period in2006, each independent shop unit along the street was re-corded by both a photograph of the shop façade, as well asa brief face-to-face survey conducted within the shop. Fromthis initial survey, it was apparent that there were227 units along the mile length of the street, with 133 inde-pendent shops amongst these. From survey interviews with105 independent proprietors, it emerged that there wereover twenty different countries of origin amongst theseproprietors, with no single place of origin predominating.The street is therefore composed of a diverse array of indi-viduals and places, where for example, a barbershopattracting largely clientele with links to West Africa, sitsalongside a Caff run by the second generation of immi-grants from Turkish Cyprus, which sits alongside a shopproclaiming to serve both Eritrean and Italian food. Of ana-lytic value then, are the ways in which both singular andmultiple claims to identity and culture are made in the vi-sual arrangement of the shop fronts, which must do thework of attracting a base of customers.

What this Walworth Road-World drawing suggestsabout the translocality of an urban high street in the con-

Fig. 1. The juxtaposition of the global and local. A map of the Walworth Road is aligned with a map of the world, and shows the origins and journeys of the independent shopowners. (Hall 2009, p. 83)

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text of migration is that the local is neither static nor singu-lar: Walworth Road is shaped by passages and journeys of avariety of individuals, who travel, literally and figuratively,between more than one knowledge base of local place. Fur-ther, the drawing captures the nature of an intense conver-gence of diverse individuals from within the UK and acrossthe globe, each bringing established cultural expressionsand social etiquettes to Walworth Road. However, whatthis drawing omits is the sense of time in the accumulationof these journeys. The interview material revealed thatwhere some would have travelled to the Walworth Roadin the last 5 years, others made their journey in the1950s as part of post-war immigration into London, whilstothers still inherited their units on the street from grand-parents who had set up shop in the mid nineteenth cen-tury. In addition, historic surveys such as the Post OfficeLondon Directory street surveys (1881–1950) provide a de-tailed record of respective shop activities and individualproprietors, and reveal that a mixture of entrepreneurialmigrants both from inside and outside of the UK have occu-pied and shaped the small shop spaces along the WalworthRoad, since the period of late industrialisation andurbanisation.

A fairly commonplace city street in London like the Wal-worth Road, is representative of an agglomeration of en-trenched, established and emerging migrant cultures, and

a palimpsest of immigration histories. Of crucial analyticregard then is not simply the agency of the individual pro-prietors as they migrate between places. As an aggregationof migration patterns, the map also suggests how thesemigrations are mediated by power relations, and there isa distinct pattern of already-established designations: an‘emplacement’ of certain groups of people as they migratebetween and occupy certain spaces of the city. Firstly, amap of the former British Empire is evident in the pointson the World Map, reflected in the high proportion of theproprietor’s countries of origin being former colonies ofBritain and reveals a post-colonial ’situatedness’. Secondly,the alignment of the street and world map connects the‘third world’ or ‘developing world’ to the Walworth Road,by linking places in Africa, the Middle East and the Eastto microcosms on this London street describing both aneconomic and developmental situatedness during mobility.While South America would have featured prominently onthis drawing were the proprietors at the Elephant and Cas-tle incorporated in this survey, North America and WesternEurope are largely absent from the origins marked on thisworld map. Closer scrutiny of the drawing therefore revealsdistinctive geographic patterns of mobility, agency andpower, raising questions of who travels to which placesduring migration, and why certain individuals find them-selves in particular locales in the city.

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Two short questions asked of the respective proprietorsof the independent shops along the Walworth Road were:‘How long have you been in this shop on the WalworthRoad?’ and ‘What is the country you were born in?’. Insome cases the answers coincided with historic patternsof migration. Proprietors who were originally from Greekand Turkish Cyprus, from Trinidad and Jamaica, and fromPakistan for example, proclaimed lengthy periods of occu-pation on the Street, often of 35 years or more. In a detailedethnographic study of one proprietor who came to Londonfrom Turkish Cyrus with his family in the 1950s, it wasapparent that while he visited Cyprus annually, and stillhad family ties there, London would remain his primaryplace of residence. Other patterns of emplacement reflecta lack of mobility or migration amongst those of Englishorigin, and including proprietors who had long-standinglinks and affinities with south London working-class cul-ture. Those who had occupied shops on the Walworth Roadfor less than 2 years, came from a variety of places includ-ing Iran, Vietnam, China, Sudan, Malaysia, Nigeria, India,Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey and Ghana. The significanceof this variety points to the extraordinary range of culturalorigins and references that become situated along onestreet, without any single nation, ethnicity or culture pre-dominating. There is also a distinctive socio-economic les-son to be drawn in the study of migration and urbanlivelihoods, in this case how the practice of street-orientedretail provides a common foothold for diverse individualsin the city.

Visual signscape as a form of translocality

The entrepreneurship of migrants in ordinary spacesalong the Walworth Road provides analytic territory to ex-plore everyday socio-economic practices through whichmigrants situate their mobility. But in a context of multipleand variegated mobilities such as the Walworth Road howdo the proprietors of the independent shops communicatewith a broad base of customers? Through their selection ofproducts and services, how do they market or display theirshop identities? In the following images of shopfront dis-plays along the Walworth Road, we argue that the shopfontacts as the first platform of communication, and inattempting to capture diverse customers, visual signscapesprovide an important mode of legibility in both a mobileand multicultural context.

The visual sequence of display is a primary mode ofcommunication used by proprietors on the Walworth Roadto combine entrepreneurial and cultural expressions,where a combination of imagination and acumen is em-ployed to attract a variegated customer base. The ways inwhich individual, ethnic and cultural differences are cho-reographed within these visual and spatial displays distin-guish not only the shop products, but also the identity ofthe proprietor and how he or she anticipates the needsand preferences of prospective customers. As will be seen,the particularity of each shop is defined by an arrangementbased on cultural identity rather than product based iden-tity. In contrast, in many of the franchise or chain stores onthe Walworth Road, which have a pre-established productand brand such as Kentucky Fried Chicken, Mac Donald’s orBoots, the merchandise and brand established the promi-

nent expression of the space. These spaces tended to reflecthighly a standardised organisation of space by item-to-shelf sequence, and the familiarity of a brand-oriented shopidentity is promoted. Arguably, the particularity and vari-ety of visual and spatial arrangements in the independentshops offer a contrasting, more variegated view of globali-sation: one in which the flows of people, objects, ideas andaffinities combine, alter and rearrange to create less pre-dictable cultural experiences. Visual displays that describethe flows of economies and individuals across the globemight therefore operate in two distinctive ways: those thatdepend on the application of sameness across place; andthose that emerge out of the local particularities in whichone or more places are combined.

In many of the independent shops along Walworth Roadthe displays were shaped by a combination of cultural andpersonal affinities of both proprietors and customers. Inone Halal convenience shop, for example, the space was di-vided into two areas. The first, closest to the street, had arange of food products, including the meat counter, whilethe second space, further from the street, stocked foodgoods more oriented to North African and Muslim custom-ers. In this second space there were pictures of Mecca and asmall prayer area. The proprietor, who had recently arrivedfrom Sudan, promoted his primary public display or hisstreet frontage through signage in both Arabic and English,using a selection of words aimed at including a wide cus-tomer base: ‘Absar Food Store. Camberwell Halal Butchersand Grocery. Afro Caribbean and Mediterranean Fresh Fruitand Veg’.

Other shop signage along the Walworth Road also repre-sented a desire to reach a diverse customer base, some-times with humour such as, ‘Mixed Blessings Bakery,West Indian and English Bread’, Cultural and spatial refer-encing was not the only mode of multiplicity represented,and signage such as ‘Roze and Lawanson Nigerian Market,Money Transfer, Wedding Garments’ and ‘Afroworld FoodStore. Cosmetics, wigs and fruit and veg’ allude to the curi-ous combinations of merchandise and services offeredwithin these independent shops (Fig. 2). The kind ofplace-making that emerges out of how mobile subjects sit-uate themselves in their own retail spaces is an act of com-munication and interpretation. It is the simultaneoustranslocal practice of translating not only ‘who I am’ butalso ‘where I am’, and of understanding not only ‘who Iam’, but also ‘who else is here’.

In exploring the visual signscapes along the street, it isboth analytically useful to focus in on small signs, particu-lar objects, or interior divisions within a particular shop, aswell as to zoom out to explore the visual and experientialeffects of the amalgamation of these shops along the street.This relates not only to the selective process in the field-work exercise of which elements to capture, but also tothe discretion in the writing exercise of how to combineimages to represent the street. The process of combiningand arranging photographs of the street brought aboutthe challenge of how to group the visual shop displayswithout necessarily reverting to classification by origin ofproprietor. The survey and fieldwork data that emergedshowed that it was difficult to conclusively relate particularmerchandise or services with particular ethnic groups orplaces of origin. What was apparent was the predominance

Fig. 2. shop signs on the Walworth Road which refer to a range of spaces, places and connections (Hall 2009, p. 89)

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of food related shops both of the retail and restaurant type,where the display of food and the arrangement of spacesfor eating food, appeared as a primary medium for culturaland social exchange (Fig. 3). Displays of fruit and vegeta-bles evoked a rich cultural collage, where West Africanyams, Plantain bananas and Turkish Olives were suggestiveof the range of individuals shopping on the street. At thesame time, cheap or bargain merchandise, most evidentlyclothing, followed by assortments of inexpensive house-hold goods including those in charity shops, provided addi-tional visual displays, which tended to be directed atshoppers who were on fairly tight budgets. There were alsoa number of jewellery and pawnshops, as well as bettingestablishments and places to cash cheques and accessquick loans (Fig. 4). These commonplace goods and servicesshown in Figs. 3 and 4 point precisely to the notion of theordinary city, where the overlap of diverse individualsand spaces produces an everyday rather than exoticurbanity.

What remained as a consistent dimension of this diversebut everyday entrepreneurship is the spatial pattern of aretail street lined with small-scale increments of retailspace, generally of narrow frontage, always limited to the

ground floor, and with a visual and spatial identity revealedin the items and sequence of display. Significantly, this spa-tial pattern could be understood as a basic urban frame-work for subjectivity, or a collective pattern in whichindividual proprietors along this street made use of theopportunity for expression and engagement in the streetsociety in which they are active citizens.

Above all, these visual displays serve to communicatethe multiple connections that individuals accumulate andmaintain as they move within and across cities. These par-ticular shopfront images are expressive of a combination ofregional, national and everyday references. As a primarycultural cue, specific national affinities are named; ‘Eritre-an’, ‘Nigerian’, ‘Chinese’, ‘English’ but are often placedside-by-side: ‘West Indian and English’; ‘Eritrean and Ital-ian’. But the prosaic dimensions of the shop signs also pro-vide very basic references to economic affinities; ‘moneytransfers’; ‘cosmetics’, ‘food and groceries’. In this interest-ing overlap of national belongings and everyday needs, atranslocal language emerges that connects a variety ofspaces and places and puts them in close physical or imag-inative proximity, without necessarily producing a hierar-chy in the nature of identity or difference.

Fig. 3. Retail groupings of the independent shops on the Walworth Road. (Hall 2009, p. 92)

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Translocality in the ordinary city

This paper has highlighted the expression of situatedmobility through a visual medium of communication

where something as prosaic as a shop front display pro-vides a surface to project, explore, read and interpretmobilities and connections across spaces and places thatare physically distanciated. In spite of the fluidity of econ-

Fig. 4. Shop activities on the Walworth Road. (Hall 2009, p. 93)

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omy, people and objects in a global world, much of the con-tact between individuals and groups occurs through regu-lar, face-to-face and in place forms of communication. Infocusing on the visual signscapes of everyday livelihoodsalong the Walworth Road, we have attempted to move to-wards an understanding of translocality as a significant vi-

sual medium of communication along an inner Londonretail street. In seeking to understand the ways in whichmobile actors situate themselves in their imagined andphysical journeys across neighbourhoods, cities and na-tions, we argue for an understanding of these spaces andplaces along the Walworth Road as translocal – that is to

S. Hall, A. Datta / City, Culture and Society 1 (2010) 69–77 77

see these as not simply territorial or bounded as physicalforms, rather as sites where mobile identities are materia-lised and embodied. This ‘situatedness’ is rooted in anunderstanding of how culture emerges out of the contactthat most readily occurs within the spontaneity of every-day life. In pursuing a visual analysis of everyday entrepre-neurship that is increasingly conditioned by movement andflux, the translocal lens argues for an understanding of howindividual mobilities are mediated: how nationality, eth-nicity, race, class and gender position individuals with re-spect to certain localities and connections. Therefore,while exploring social and economic exchange and com-munication through individual bodies, signs and spaceson the Walworth Road, we have also attempted to situatethese within an uneven and rapidly changing world.

This paper therefore argues for a production of a translo-cal visuality that is grounded in an understanding of thesubtle and complex ways that individuals actually seek tomake places and spaces within an ordinary city. From thiswe can begin to learn how to read and analyse translocalityin terms of how individuals accumulate and communicateboth their own cultural references, as well as those of theirperceived and targeted clientele. We have focused on theforms of visual display on the small urban exteriors of theindependent shops, precisely because in their smallnessand ordinariness, varied expressions emerge and are re-fined. However the extent of social exchange between di-verse individuals within the shop interiors is not apparentthrough the methods of visual and verbal surveys. To ac-cess the nuanced ways in which individuals preserve socialdistances, maintain or equally transgress deep national, ra-cial, ethic and cultural boundaries requires an ethnographicapproach.

A question raised by this paper then, is whether we gaina different sense of migration and transnationalismthrough a lens of translocal situated mobilities? The visualsignscapes briefly explored in this paper suggest not only

the social and economic importance of a visual, and argu-ably more legible, medium of communication in a contextwhere culture is complexly negotiated and reworked; italso suggests that visual signscapes can be read throughdisplays, range from individual aspirations, to culturalaffinities, to the economic locale in which individuals live.Therefore the collection of mundane objects in the ‘onepound’ store are just as important to the analysis of every-day practices, as are the vivid collage of exotic ‘fruit andveg’ in the convenience store. In learning to recognise theordinary and everyday adaptations of urban multi-culturesin the context of migration and mobility, these visual sign-scapes emerge as the sites of translocal linkages betweenspaces and places that are distanced yet make London’sincredibly diverse neighbourhoods.

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