A Politics of the Urban Ordinary: The Material Ad Hoc-ness of Shops in London

Abstract

This visual essay offers an urban photographic exploration of the politics of the urban ordinary in and around commonplace shops. It draws from a visual ethnography of corner shops and kiosks in Bloomsbury, Central London—places that are not developed through the holistic design narratives familiar to most urban retail, but ones that emerge through everyday material and practice. The images, field notes, and quotes presented here are part of a larger doctoral research project that used in-shop ethnography to explore how the shops’ practices of curation and lively materials intersect with forces of the city. These forces are numerous, but might include the dynamism of urban matter, the currents of neighborhood change, the fluid manifestations of the urban brand, and the translocalism of the shopkeepers and precarity of their lives. The project came to see these forces not merely as external pressures, but intrinsically wrapped up in the material ad hoc-ness of the shops and their ways of quietly getting by. This photo essay touches on these threads through the collection and curation of fragments; not unlike the unruly aesthetics of these shops, this piece uses an ad hoc montage to tell some of their stories. The juxtapositions of image and text represent an experiment in visual storytelling and acknowledgment that the shops—and their politics—are difficult and multiple.