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

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

Research highlights► Expressions of 'situated mobilities' are explored through the visual medium of communication; specifically the shop front displays on a south London street. ► Streets in local neighbourhoods can be understood not simply as bounded territories but sites where mobile identities are materialised and embodied. ► A production of a translocal visuality can be grounded in and therefor analysed through the subtle and complex ways that individuals actually make places and spaces in the city. Although this paper highlights translocal visuality, the diverse ways in which individuals and groups actually engage or disengage with one another, should necessarily complemented by ethnographic research.