To start with I decided to take the stretch of road that goes right from the junction between Old St and Kingsland Rd, right up to the Stamford Hill and Amhurst Park junction. This stretch pretty much runs from as far south in Hackney as you get to as far north as you get. On the way it also takes in Kingsland High St, Stoke Newington Rd and Stoke Newington High St. I started by simply walking stretches of the roads with my camera, and the first thing I noticed was the pockets of particular types of restaurants and food shops—Vietnamese towards Shoreditch, Turkish in Dalston and Stoke Newington and Jewish at Stamford Hill. In between these main concentrations were others—Caribbean, Ethiopian, Brazilian, Polish, Chinese, English greasy spoons and English cafe bars of an all together more gentrified type.
Clearly the only thing to do was to eat my way from one end of Hackney to the other!
So I began to eat, but after two or three days I thought perhaps I should run this by my holy trinity of professors as they were blissfully unaware of my plans. Immediately I was asked 'how does this fit in with your research?'
Well...I said, I suppose it fits with the ethnographic methodology, and am I doing some observation/field notes stuff, which is something I said I would do and hadn't really yet as I hadn't had a particular reason/focus to do it for. It will be good to have that to work with as I guess the issue of 'translating' the field notes and data into some kind of final 'text' is at the heart of the research, and will be something geographers/ethnographers will be able to relate to. I also think it is a subject matter that is quite relevant to Hackney and the many other places that have a multi-cultural mix of people. I suppose it also tests a different kind of 'relationship' with the field - I am participating, but it is more 'removed' than the stuff book, where I engaged with a few people over the course of a few weeks & months, having to build up relationships. However, as I am chatting to waiters and asking about foodstuffs, etc, it is more in depth than the overhearing conversations. In a way, it is the middle of the idea of a macro to micro view again. It is also, like the Edinburgh books, a very experiential and immediate way of relating to place in terms of the research process—it puts me physically right in the midst of the everyday and perhaps is a more usual experience of place, and therefore will give me content to work with that gets towards a 'sense of place' in a slightly different way to some of the other projects. So I think it works well as another project to test the front end of the geo/graphic design process in terms of ways of engaging with, and, researching and recording, place.
With regard to the specific graphic design element, I guess I don't know yet exactly what it will turn into, it may even become more than one thing. However, I think it will be interesting to play an editing role with data I have generated, rather than that I have gathered from other people - I am thinking two things here - a reflexive awareness of my own presence in the text, but also just a plain old 'is this interesting enough' take on it. One thing I am thinking about is creating a piece of work that brings together a range of different bits of writing - observations from the field by me, and related social/cultural historical texts, so it will be a challenge to weave these in successfully, thinking about hierarchy, meaning, narrative and Ingold and Mermoz's thoughts on the page and typography. I think there might also be something in there about mapping. Not that I may make maps, but that I am dealing with data that is spatial in relation to the pockets of different types of restaurants along the roads, but also spatial in terms of the communities roots in Vietnam, Turkey or wherever. It might be interesting if the piece or one of them ends up exploring some more maplike graphics but not in maps - I guess that will also then link to the Edinburgh book and the little map books. There is, for me something very seductive about 'mapness' and maybe this could be interesting to incorporate/test. I am sure as I start to work with the 'data' more things will emerge, but I am not sure I can plan to test something particular graphically (other than the broad things I have said above) as that would kind of prejudice the design process.
So, 10 food and drink stops in, and I am starting to sign off my emails as 'Fat Al' and am attempting to get to the gym more often to counter the calorific effects. I shall start to post some of my experiences shortly. Maybe I'll also have some kind of weighometer going on also!
