Peckham tales.

Urban ethnographic work is still relatively rare in mainstream urban studies and yet it may be an essential component. Some of the promise of such work is indicated by this paper. Inspired by the Mass Observation movement of the late 1930s and a recent challenge by Kevin Robins as well as work by Henri Lefebvre and Zygmunt Bauman, it enacts a search for the modalities of community in the south London district of Peckham. Starting with media tales, Stanton encounters iconic buildings, ethnic dimensions of meat, consumption worlds, religious tales, and ends with an explicit relic of Empire. Of some of the black churches he comments that they represent religious globalization and their cries for an end of ethnic suffering through redemptive love of Christ say much for histories which remain hidden and untold. What is in effect an essential companion piece for this emerging take on the cultural complexities of ‘glocal’ realities is Elisa Joy White's ‘Forging African diaspora places in Dublin's retro‐global spaces: Minority making in a new global city’, City 6(2), 2002, pp. 251–270. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]