The Overlaid Past: The Politics of Space and Memory in Gibraltar’s ‘Doubling’ Street Naming Principle

Abstract

This chapter engages with the resilience of traditional streets names at Gibraltar together with the resistance they posed to the implementation of official street names. The permanence of traditional names, in use pre-1704 until the mid-nineteen seventies, raises questions regarding Edward Said’s theory of imaginative geographies regarding the colonially informed mapping of a territory. Whilst this (did) level of mapping was exercised at Gibraltar post-1704, I suggest that this process proved to be incomplete when it came to the territory’s urban streetscape, a space which had already been imaginatively mapped by the inhabitants though a linguistically and culturally codified street naming principle. These traditional street names existed only in their imagination as they did not appear on street signs, yet they were extremely effective in disrupting access to a military based settler community. As newcomers to the territory, this sector was linguistically and culturally ill equipped to decipher the norms underpinning these names, rendering this group quite unable to easily find locations in the territory’s city centre. Testament to this was the need to publish lists of street names even after official street names were placed on street corners in the 1870s. However, rather than leading to greater access or effective mapping, these publicly displayed official names created a doubling through the co-existence of two parallel albeit very different sets of nomenclature. This (piece) chapter aims at unpacking the terms under which traditional street names were generated and sustained, together with the challenge they posed to a colonially informed mapping necessary for fixity and control over the territory. Attention will be drawn towards initiatives to publish lists bearing both official and traditional street names; the aim was to decodify if not decentre these traditional names, but at a practicable level, these lists were deemed as necessary tools to be able to navigate Gibraltar’s streets. Whilst difficult to fully measure their success, the need to publish lists over a prolonged period of time offers insight into the limitations of a colonially informed mapping process when faced with a far more powerful mapping principle that existed only in the minds of Gibraltarians.