Making Markets Making Place: Geography, Topo/graphy and the Reproduction of an Urban Marketplace 3030728641, 9783030728649

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Topo/graphic Introductions: Places, Markets and Marketplaces
Entering the Marketplace
Positioning the Marketplace
The Place of the Market
A Methodology for a Marketplace
Topo/graphy
To the Market(place)…
References
Chapter 2: Positioning Borough Market as Market and Marketplace
A Field in Chorleywood
Re/Placing Food
Placing Alternatives
Placing Urban Marketplaces
Borough Market and the City
Conclusions: Placing the Marketplace
References
Chapter 3: Imagined Geographies of the Marketplace: Fashioned Materialities
A Fine Alternative for a Market
Material Semiotics
Placement and Place: The Market’s Built Environment
Iron and Glass
Floral Hall
Market Things and What They Say
Bakers
Butchers
Materials and Meanings: Assembling the Market of Signs
Conclusions
References
Chapter 4: From Tree to Cup: Coffee and Commodity Culture in Borough Market
Cups of Coffee
Discovery: Placing Quality, Identifying Value
Transformation: Commoditizing Quality, Expressing Value
Translation: Performing Quality, Realizing Value
Conclusions: An Economy of Quality
References
Chapter 5: Vibrancy, Conviviality and Buzz: Reproducing Market and Marketplace
Buzzing Marketplace
Defining Buzz
Performing the Social
Relating Consumers
Performing the Marketplace
Leaky Space(s) and the Sensescape of the Market
The Sights
The Sounds
The Smells
The Feel of the Place
The Tastes
The Buzz: Towards A(nother) Geography of Borough Market
(Re)defining the Buzz
Critical Mass
The Market Buzzing
Conclusions: The Fuel of an Economy
References
Chapter 6: Assembling the Marketplace
Buzzing Marketplace
Buzzing Borough Market
Spatial Implications
Place-Fetish
Conclusions Leaving the Marketplace
References
Index

Citation preview

Making Markets Making Place Geography, Topo/graphy and the Reproduction of an Urban Marketplace

Benjamin Coles

Making Markets Making Place

Benjamin Coles

Making Markets Making Place Geography, Topo/graphy and the Reproduction of an Urban Marketplace

Benjamin Coles SGGE University of Leicester Leicester, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-72864-9    ISBN 978-3-030-72865-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72865-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to Lowri, to the Squids and to the people who make markets and marketplaces.

Acknowledgements

Although book-writing is meant to be a solo intellectual effort with authors glued to their chairs and buried away in their working places. Like places, however, books are social, as well as social and sensual. Suggesting that they are discursive too would belabour the point, as well as highlight the obvious. In the research and writing of this book, I benefited greatly from a wide range of social relations and support. First, and most significant, are the market traders, some of whose names appear in the following pages in one dis/guise or another. Without such people, neither market nor marketplace would ever come into being, let alone this book. Thanks also to Phil Crang—without his encouragement over the years it took to finally get this work to press, it would never have happened, and the project would have never started; Tim Unwin for pedantic questions, and Garth Myers and Chris Brown for introducing me to geography and place. I would also like to acknowledge Royal Holloway University of London, the good people who administered the Overseas Research Student Award Scheme, and the University of Leicester School of Geography, Geology and Environment and College of Science and Engineering. The latter approved the period of leave over which this got written. In particular I would like to thank Sarah Davies for supporting my applications for sabbatical. I am also extremely grateful for the many conversations I’ve had over the years with a wide range of scholars of multiple disciplines. Each of those discussions has somehow informed this work: the Landscape Surgery Group at Royal Holloway; the SOAS food writers group consisting of vii

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Harry West, Anne Murcott, Jacob Klein, Johan Pottier and Elizabeth Hull; Emma-Jayne Abbots, who was also part of that group, but with whom discussions extended further into a number of different collaborations; Peter Jackson and the CONANX group; Alison Barnes, with whom topo/graphy became something; Lucius Hallett, Adam Barker, Emma Batell-Lowman, the Matts (Tillotson and Wilde), Loretta Lees and Gavin Brown. Particular thanks go to David Evans and Jonathan Everts, both of whom not only commented on earlier drafts of this work, but suggested that I keep going with it. Finally, I am grateful to Rachael Ballard and Jasper Asir, both for their support, and to the latter in particular for his patience, and for allowing me a series of one-more-week(s). To Lowri, Edwin and Thomas, to whom this book is dedicated, thank you for the time and space that allowed me to get this done.

Contents

1 Topo/graphic Introductions: Places, Markets and Marketplaces  1 2 Positioning Borough Market as Market and Marketplace 25 3 Imagined Geographies of the Marketplace: Fashioned Materialities 47 4 From Tree to Cup: Coffee and Commodity Culture in Borough Market 77 5 Vibrancy, Conviviality and Buzz: Reproducing Market and Marketplace105 6 Assembling the Marketplace139 Index155

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 6.1

Under the arches The place of the marketplace To market, to market… Assembled material culture Iron and glass Material culture of a material culture The Borough Market ‘barrow’ Assembling ‘good food’ Different arches, same coffee Coffee stories from around the world Coffee: a commodity in waiting From estates around the world The science of place-making Making places through commodities A democracy of the senses Producing and consuming a marketplace Buzzing market Fueling the spectacle Consuming the buzz Positive spillover effects

2 7 16 51 55 59 62 69 79 82 90 93 94 100 106 114 127 131 133 142

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CHAPTER 1

Topo/graphic Introductions: Places, Markets and Marketplaces

Abstract  What is it about markets and marketplaces in the city? Beginning with a ‘topo/graphic’ vignette that introduces Borough Market, and its cultures of consumption, this chapter sets the stage for the book. It sketches out the ways in which urban markets and marketplaces are becoming increasingly visible in academic and lay debates about cities, and outlines why this book’s conceptual and methodological attention to place and place-making is necessary to frame markets and marketplaces and offers critical insights into the changing roles that they play in a city’s political and cultural economy. Critically, along with introducing the book’s main arguments, this chapter argues that current scholarship in which markets and marketplaces feature tends to overlook the geographies of the marketplace, and the internal and external dynamics of place that constitute the marketplace, focusing instead on their political-economic or social-culture dimensions. It argues further that topo/graphy is one way to examine these geographies, interrogate their constituent relations and examine their effects. The chapter closes by briefly outlining the book’s topo/graphic logic, followed by a brief overview of the chapters and their organization. Keywords  Markets • Marketplaces • Urban cultural economy • Place • Topography and topology

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Coles, Making Markets Making Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72865-6_1

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Entering the Marketplace Under the arches of the rail line that connects commuters from the southeast of England to the London’s financial institutions—that slow bend between London Bridge and Canon Street Stations—it is grimy and always damp. Drips are common. I watch one fall through the hole in the lid of my coffee cup mixing with its contents, and contaminating the otherwise pure, ‘single estate’ coffee from a finca in Guatemala with, let’s call it, ‘viaduct water’ and whatever other urban mirco-ecologies are transported with this water as it seeps through more than a century’s worth of city brickwork. This would not happen at any of the nearby chain coffee shops where the borders between the bio-physical world (e.g. (N)atures) and the reified social world of commodities in late-consumer capitalism are clearly delineated and carefully mediated. And, if it did, that would mean something has gone wrong. I’m in Borough Market, however, a marketplace. Such boundaries are porous. Drips happen (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1  Under the arches

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Amidst the drips and grime, Borough Market is exceptionally crowded with vendors, shoppers and tourists, each vying for a piece of the marketplace. Often times, it is hard to walk through the marketplace. It is lively, vibrant and buzzy; the body is assailed by its sights, sounds, smells, feelings and tastes, and it is easier to be taken up by the throng. Other times, the marketplace is dead, feeling stale and tired. A brisk commodity trade underlies the sense of being of and in the marketplace. Indeed, its commodity transactions are fuelled by the market’s social-sensuality, and their fuelling depends on how the marketplace’s social-sensuality plays out. In marketplaces like this, the metabolic relationship between (N)ature and social reproduction that Marx uses to preface his interrogation of capitalist exchange enters into the realm of the commodity (Marx 1976). Objects with use values become totems for transaction. Values of commodities (e.g. exchange-values) are negotiated and exchanged, and surplus exchange-values are realized as profits. Consequently, commodities are consumed and transformed back into use values (McNally 2012). This makes marketplaces materially and metaphorically ‘hot’, investing in them a spectral quality in which seemingly anything can happen. Such places are the site of the commodity fetish. These fetishes work not only to hide the social relations embedded in commodities, in the marketplace; they normalize the idea of market exchange. Part and parcel to the fetish, establishing it but also going beyond it, marketplaces, however, are intensely social and sensual. They are sites of rich experience, and sometimes have deep meanings that invite close engagement. The social-­ sensuality of the marketplace goes hand in hand with its function as a site of capital, contributing to the fetish rather than to its de-mystification. Thus, marketplaces are sites where the veil between the lived, material world of objects, utility and social-sensuality, and the spectral world of commodities and exchange value is thinnest (McNally 2012), and the rawness of market capitalism begins to show through. Marketplaces occupy a range of positions in the economy. They establish as well as reproduce and perform the practices and conventions of market economies (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006). Along with financial capital, they generate the cultural and social capital that is often deemed vital to the economic position and power of the so-called world cities (Sassen 2013; Yeoh 2005). This makes them one of the innumerable sites of stickiness (Markusen 1996) within the circulations and flows that comprise the spaces of global markets and economies (Amin and Cohendet 2004). Marketplaces are also social and sensual. They are where people

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buy ‘stuff’, but also ‘rub’ together, establishing and defying social convention as they reproduce an everyday economy (Watson 2009). As a result, marketplaces emerge from the interplay between the relational spatialities that define markets and economies—‘market-space’ (Bestor 2004)—and the richly embedded economic knowledges, practices, meanings, materialities and experiences that comprise being in and part of particular marketplaces (Probyn 2011). Considering the marketplace through the lenses (market) space and place (marketplace), however raises conceptual and methodological questions about the relationship between place and space, and its role in constituting such relational spatialities. To address these questions, this book develops a topo/graphy (place/writing) of one particular marketplace, London’s Borough Market. Akin to ethnography, topo/graphy is a deep account of place and place-making that ‘writes’ place to examine the spatial alchemy from which I argue (market) place and space emerge (Coles 2014). Drawing its theoretical positioning from ontological debates and framings of place, space and spatiality (e.g. Allen 2016; Martin and Secor 2014; Malpas 2012a, b; Casey 2013; Massey 2005; Amin 2004; Sack 1997), topo/graphy focuses particularly on the interplay between the extensiveness of space and the boundedness of place (Malpas 2008). This book’s main aim is to utilize topo/graphy to unpack these interior and exterior spatial dynamics that constitute the marketplace. It focuses specifically on the material-semiotics, commodity cultures and ephemeral, sensual ‘buzz’ that emerge as Borough Market’s material, social, discursive and sensual relations knit together. I argue that the space of the market (e.g. market-space) unfolds from the marketplace as these relations are simultaneously drawn in and woven together through its reproduction, and that topo/graphy provides a useful methodological position for describing and analysing how these relations take place. In developing these arguments, this book’s topo/graphical project positions the spatial processes of markets and economies as place-­processes, such as those of that constitute the marketplace as a place. This is in response to the intensive theorization and new spatialities that seemingly emerged from the globalization of capital over the last half-century, which consequently led to the under-theorization of place. Eroding the textures and depth of place (Hudson 1999), the spatialities of globalization have seemingly given way to a discourse and, subsequently, to a spatial logic of topology (Allen 2016), conceived of, and articulated through a language of frictionless relations and flows (see Amin and Cohendet 2004). Thus,

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conceptually and methodologically, this book revisits the ontological ‘turn’ towards ‘flattened’ relational spatialities (Escobar 2007; Jones 2009), which have come to inform thinking on markets and economies, and tend to discount the importance of place when it comes the relationalities that constitute space (Boggs and Rantisi 2003; Müller and Schurr 2016). By endeavouring to reinvigorate conceptual and methodological interest and debate over place, this book focuses on the ‘frictions’ and ‘grooves’ (Nayak 2017: 3), that constitute the marketplace. The rest of this chapter explores these ideas in greater depth. I begin by critically examining the ways in which contemporary scholarship tends to overlook the workings of the marketplace and place more generally when configuring the spatiality of markets and economies. I then consider topo/ graphy’s conceptual and methodological underpinnings and its materials and methods. I close with a brief description of the rest of this book.

Positioning the Marketplace Defined through the density and intensity of their relations, markets and economies seem to emanate across and at the same time constitute a topological space (Müller 2015; Faulconbridge 2014; O’Callaghan et  al. 2015). Amin and Cohendet (2004: 93) suggest that focusing on these topologies and their flows and circulations of capital, commodities and knowledge allows for ‘an understanding of sites as a node of multiple knowledge connections, of varying intensity and spatial distance, as a place of trans-scaler and non-linear connections, and as a relay point of circulating knowledges that cannot be territorially attributed with any measure of certainty or fixity’ (2004: 93) (see also Amin 2002). Seemingly engendered by globalization, the resulting spatiality, described by the ‘language of ‘circulations’ and ‘flows’, nonetheless remains ambiguous and conceptually weak (Malpas 2012b: 229). It likewise raises significant ontological questions and about the nature of relational spatiality in general, and the role(s) that the relationship between space and place play in its constitution. One question in particular that animates this book, is about the role of place and place-making within the wider spatial machinations of markets and economies. Though not specifically pointing towards place or marketplaces, unresolved ontological issues have long haunted questions pertaining to the spatiality of markets. Berndt and Boeckler (2009: 536), for instance, comment that ‘markets do not simply fall out of thin air, but are continually

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reproduced socially with the help of actors who are interlinked in dense and extensive webs of interrelations’. Likewise, inviting a turn towards theories of practice, Jones and Murphy (2011: 367) raise the need (re) consider the ‘stabilized, routinized, or improvised social actions that constitute and reproduce economic space’. The implication is that such dense interrelations and social actions ultimately require places in which and through which to be enacted and performed. Emphasizing the ‘ontological mutuality’ of relata and relation (Malpas 2012b: 239), and thus the concomitancy of place and space, Malpas (2008) argues emphatically that that space itself happens through the unfolding of place. Not specifically engaging with the particularity of place, the spatiality of ‘new’ economic sociology and anthropology of Michel Callon (Callon 1998; Muniesa et  al. 2007) begins to develop such a spatial outlook. Marshalling framings akin to that of Actor Network Theory, marketplaces can be envisioned as discrete sites whereby economies are enacted, practised, and reproduced at a range of positions and scales within a globalized circulation of capital and commodities. It stands to reason that such spaces of markets and economies are generated by and enacted through a constellation of places that comprise the marketplace, in generalized and spatially ambiguous terms, as well as particular sites (marketplaces) whereby market functions such as the negotiation and exchange values can be carried out. Contributions from Zaloom (2006), Çalişkan (2010), Abolafia (2001), Bestor (2004), for instance, each illustrates the ways in which individual marketplaces function as one of many nodes through which flows of materials, knowledge and capital establish the space(s) of the economy. Anthropologist Theodore Bestor’s (2004) pivotal work on marketplaces in particular highlights this spatiality of through what he terms ‘market-­ space’. Positioning Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market at the centre of such flows, he (2004: 17–18) argues that the marketplace is a ‘highly specific place… connected with the creation of boundaries, identities and affiliations…[and] is the product of and mechanism for articulating larger spheres of social and cultural relationships… [creating] the perception of spatial (and social) fixity in the midst of processual fluidity’. Missing within such a framing is the lack of a specific attention to the dynamics of place, and the roles they play in constituting the marketplace and articulating as the (market) spaces over which they reach. This itself requires a more thorough theorization of place in general, and of marketplaces in particular.

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The Place of the Market Scholarship surrounding the place of marketplaces, tends to focus on the ways that economic relations are constituted within wider social, cultural, political and, indeed, material milieus (Fig. 1.2). Geertz (1978: 29), for instance, positions the ‘bazaar economy’ as a ‘distinctive system of social relations that [are] fundamentally important to the production and consumption of goods’. Described as ‘contact zones’ (Bishop 2011), and as ‘sites of encounter’ (Hiebert et  al. 2015), individual marketplaces are intensely social-sensual. They are where the ‘stuff’ of lived experiences— people, things and ideas—come together through commodity exchange (Watson 2009). Marketplaces are also interconnected to constellation of other places and spaces, making them cosmopolitan centres (Duruz 2011; Duruz et  al. 2011). Thus, the social-sensuality of the marketplace goes hand in hand with its capacity to facilitate economic exchange (De La Pradelle 2006) (see also Choo 2011). This leads Probyn to (2011: 684)

Fig. 1.2  The place of the marketplace

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to argue that confronting market and marketplace means to bring ‘the market’ as ‘sites of monetary exchange’ with the faculty to turn ‘some things’ into ‘commodities’, together with marketplaces as sites of rich materiality, as well as social-sensuality. Owing to the ways that marketplaces are often positioned as historical fixtures within urban landscapes, however, they have come to comprise important components of an urban imaginary, instead of as centres of economy, per say (Seale 2016; Parham 2015; Cresswell 2012; Zukin 2012). Indeed, specific marketplaces are typically positioned as sites and context where other sociopolitical relations such as gentrification (González and Waley 2013) or national identity and social exclusion (Tchoukaleyska 2013) are negotiated. Or, as  Lauermann (2012, 2013) illustrates, where broader political and economic machinations, such as neoliberalism, are reflected and subsequently performed through embedded material and social practices. Indeed, marketplaces often figure in discourses surrounding ‘global’ cities. Their roles in economic reproduction are bound to liveability (Teo 2014), along with theatres, music-venues, galleries and other creative outlets. In this context, they lend cities an air of distinction (Arribas-Bel et al. 2016; Silver and Clark 2013; Currid and Williams 2010; Zukin 2009, 2012), and generate a social sensual ‘buzz’ through which the ‘real’ business of urban economies is generated (Bathelt and Glückler 2014; Bathelt and Turi 2011; Storper and Venables 2004) (see also Laurier 2008). Regardless, the rich combinations of materiality, sociality and sensuality that enable marketplaces to occupy these multiple positions are likewise the essence that provides the foundation for their positions as economic agents in their own rights. Zaloom (2006) and Çalişkan (2010), in particular, focus on how the interplay between the materiality and social-­ sensuality of particular marketplaces—their topographies—generates their economic impetus. Examining the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) and Izmir Cotton Exchange, respectively, they highlight how the physical layout of trading floors, along with the positioning of traders’ bodies, their status (Caliskan) and their capacity to shove each other and to shout (Zaloom) are the basis for the transfer of information and knowledge as well as trust that underpins economic exchange. The interconnectivity of the marketplace—its topology—enables these embedded and embodied relations to reverberate around the world. To put it another way, the economic ideologies, technologies and institutions of globalization that might otherwise promote the erosion of place to reproduce an image of a deterritorialized spatiality of relational flows, are in fact situated into the

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material, social, sensual and discursive relations of place. Thus, confronting the marketplace, means confronting both the topologies and topographies that comprise it.

A Methodology for a Marketplace One of the central features of place is a seeming paradox between its phenomenological dimensions that binds place to the body and site, makes it intimate and experiential, and enrols the body in its reproduction (Casey 2013), and the relationality and openness that reproduces individual places through their interrelation with other places (Massey 1994; Sack 2003). As noted previously, the revelations surrounding recent waves of economic globalization, including flows of information, people and capital, are defining features of social-economic life. Likewise, open senses of place, and the flattened, relational spatial ontologies that they imply, have come to dominate socio-spatial discourse (see also: Müller and Schurr 2016; Jessop et al. 2008; Escobar 2007). From this perspective, location and territoriality, often associated with place, give way to the intensity of relations as they interconnect through and generate space (Allen 2016). Consequently, place and region, long the sites of action for economies (for economic inquiry) are ‘unbound’, comprised instead of a ‘spatiality of flow, juxtaposition, porosity and relational connectivity’ (Amin 2004: 34). Markets and economies have thus become understood through a topology of constituent ‘flows’—flows of capital, goods, people or ideas (Amin 2004). Malpas (2012a: 239) (see also Malpas 2012b), however, insists on defining the terms of such a spatiality, namely the relation, and the nature of its relationships that define its space. In particular, Malpas argues that the relation ‘is dependent on what it relates, but what is related is also dependent on the relation’. In other words, relations and their points of origin—for example, places, for Malpas—are mutually construed. The implication of this is that the constituent components of spatiality—space, place, relata and relation—and thus spatiality itself, are generated contemporaneously with place-making, which leaves the ontological primacy such a spatiality with place (Casey 2013). The grounding for this argument relates back to place’s phenomenological dimensions: namely that it is experienced and realized through the body; it is thus made (e.g. reproduced) through embodied practices that draw together its constituent material, social-sensual and discursive relations (Casey 2013; Relph 1976)

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(see also Tuan 1977), and extend them outward through space (Malpas 2008). Empirical accounts of marketplaces nearly universally emphasize the intensity of sensual experience that comes with being in and part of particular marketplaces. Be it a rich sense-scape that is seemingly inherent to food and other markets (Coles; Choo; Duruz; Bestor), the pressure that comes with ‘making’ financial markets (Zaloom; Abolafia) or the confusion faced by outsiders attempting to negotiate traditional, ‘bazaar’ economies (Calsikan; Geertz), the sensuality of marketplaces, and of place more generally, plays a foundational role in how they are experienced but also fashioned. These same accounts of marketplaces, however, variously argue that the function of marketplaces, that is to say their economic capacity to fashion, negotiate and exchange commodities and values are encoded into these sensual experiences and the relations they engender. This means that the richly embedded experiences of being amongst the milieu of marketplaces are also generative of their economic functions as markets, and thus of the expansive relational market-spaces over which they operate. These experiences in turn result from the material, social, sensual and discursive relations that define and reproduce the marketplace as a place. ‘[T]ightly defined temporal and spatial frame[s] for the exchange and physical redistribution of goods’ (Lyon 2016: 1), marketplaces are one of the multiple places that comprise the economic geography of commodities and commodification(s) (Castree 2004). They are critically important because marketplaces are where such geographies materialize. Economic relations are laid bare, marketplaces are comprised of a collective of likeminded people—buyers and sellers—who come together in a designated site and time to exchange commodities, usually in the form of things, or their proxies. They constitute one ‘context’ in the life of objects, but a context where knowledges about the market are generated and acted upon; exchange values embedded into the materiality of objects are negotiated and extracted as profit (or not), and commodity forms of objects are disassociated from more utilitarian purposes and rendered into being (Appadurai 1988; Kopytoff 1988 1986; Sack 1988). Bare economic relations, however, are embedded in and derived from occult-like social and cultural practices predicated upon systems of meaning and belief. Such ‘magic’ hides a ‘hidden abode of production’ (Marx 1976: 279) where commodities are violently wrought from (N)ature behind a world of fetishized things (see Goss 1993, 1999). Taking

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mystical conceptualizations of commodities and capitalism at face value, Mcnally (2012: 126) comments that ‘[exchange] value is a spectral entity whose objectivity is phantom-like and can only express itself through material bodies of commodities  – including …the bodies of those who bear the commodity labour-power’. Mcnally (2012: 126) goes on to suggest that ‘commodities inhabit a world of “magic and necromancy” in which sensuous things [use-values] are mysteriously transformed into entities of an altogether different order [exchange-values], as if by alchemy’. This dominance of things ‘tends to obliterate people’s awareness and to efface their capacity for moral evaluation of the bio-logic and socio-logic of relationships and processes, particularly socioeconomic activities and relationships’ (Taussig 1980: 35). While place naturally plays a key role in fostering geographical awareness (Sack 2003), such thinglogic obliterates place and supplants it with world of fetishized images. Marketplaces mediate between these spectral spaces of the market, comprised of exchange-­relations and commodities, and the materiality, sociality and sensuality of place in which use values still seem to inhabit objects. At the same time, they obfuscate awareness of the social, and geographical processes, whereby commodities are fashioned in the first place. The place-processes of markets and economies are supplanted by a spatial logic, language and imagination that erodes place, and privileges the ‘relational flows’ of globalization over its seeming and corporeal embodiment. At the same time, the marketplace presents itself through a bewildering array of sensations, experiences, meanings and economic positions within cities, and as an interface where the mystic processes of commodities touch down into the materiality of an everyday lived space. The result is a fetish of place and space that obfuscates the relations of their own reproduction.

Topo/graphy The conceptual starting point for topo/graphy is that place as simultaneously ‘open’ to its interconnections with other places, but bounded by the interrelation of its constituent material, social, sensual and discursive ‘realms’ (Sack 1997; Coles 2014). Geographer Robert Sack (2003), who draws from Tuan (1977), suggests that place comprises a geographical ‘problematic’ whereby we  humans unavoidably transform our environments by making places to carry out particular projects—such as negotiating and exchanging commodities. Despite the specificities of their project,

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Sack  (1997) notes, all places share commonalities, namely that they are comprised of interwoven ‘realms’ (e.g. ‘nature’, ‘meanings’ and ‘social relations’), which give places their specificity and enable them to carry their projects, and they are interconnected with other places, each comprised of interrelated natures, meanings and social relations—the constellation of which comprises a geography. Place’s interconnectivity enables its openness (see Massey  2005) and, I argue, enables the unfolding of its spaces. Topo/graphy focuses on place’s in situ topographic reproduction to illustrates the ways in which relations and spaces (e.g. relational spatialities), and thus interconnections with other places, unfold from this boundedness (Malpas 2012a, b). It emerges from a moral imperative within place and place-making, which to, paraphrase Sack (2003), compels humans to seek out the real and the good by making places that enhance (rather than impoverish) geographical awareness of other places. Marketplaces, however, present a contradiction. They specifically conceal the modes of their own reproduction, as well as their connectivity to other places in order to fulfil their function as markets. Likewise, Probyn (2011) reminds us that marketplaces are both market—functioning as sites of capital and exchange, and place—comprised of rich, social-sensuality and meanings derived from being in and part of the marketplace. Chapter 2 further explores the systems of meanings (e.g. semiotics) that actively confound the market function of the marketplace by hiding them with fetishistic discourses that project images of connectivity in order to facilitate the commodity transactions therein. Topo/graphy thus endeavours to de-­ fetishize the marketplace by unravelling and tracing out the material, social, discursive and sensual relations that assemble in its reproduction. Topo/graphy’s focus on the marketplace’s constituent discourses, materialities, socialities and sensualities highlights the ways in which these relations are woven into the phenomenological senses of being in and part of place, which in turn reproduces the market. These senses, I contend, ultimately underlie the reproduction of the market and marketplace. Additionally, however, topo/graphy highlights the ways that the assembly of these relations simultaneously generates an in situ place—for example, a marketplace in a particular locale, but also extends into space—a market-­ space imaginatively and materially folding distant places into its reproduction. This sense of material ‘folding’ can be visualized by the ways in which commodities, and their bio-geographical baggage (Cook 2004), are brought into a marketplace, establishing the market in place, but connecting it to other places through space.

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Methodologically topo/graphy embraces modes of sensuous scholarship that ‘wants to awaken the imagination and bring scholarship back to the “things themselves”’ (Stoller 2010: xii) (see also Pink 2015). It accepts that place is often conceived of and represented through Cartesian dualities of self-other. This materialize as linear depictions of space and time through representative tropes that privilege the visual, such as those apparent within (L)andscape—and interrogated through landscape studies (Cosgrove 2006). Embracing the potential for non-Western epistemologies (see Stoller 1992) in the representation of place, topo/graphy collapses subject and object, positioning and representing place as the frame on which the objective, subjective and intersubjective are founded (Malpas 1998). Through topo/graphy, place emerges through its writing and its being written (insofar as a text-based medium allows). Thus, topo/graphy is posited as a critical-creative practice that ‘writes’ the topologic and topographic assembly and reproduction of the marketplace through multiple, interwoven and non-linear narratives (Coles 2014) (see also Barnes 2018; Cresswell 2012). However, it can also be thought of as a hermeneutic spatial practice in which the subject/object— in this case, place—‘creeps into the writing about it, enlivening itself no less than the writing’ (Taussig 2018: 33). As it blends presentation and representation, topo/graphy mobilizes the senses of place at the same time as it interrogates its relational assembly—blurring the objective, subjective and intersubjective as its text(s) unfold. From its inception, topo/graphy endeavours to construct rich narratives of place that explore the interplay between materialities, socialities and sensualities from which I argue cities and their places emerge (Coles 2016; Barnes 2018). Eschewing ‘zenith views’ of ‘clearly visible’, ‘globe spanning flows in capital, commodities, labor and information’ that have tended to dominate the ways in which markets are conceptualized and approached, topo/graphy descends into the city’s ‘clamorous miasmas’ (Rhys-Taylor 2020: 4). Such a descent seeks to better understand and articulate the practices and processes by which the marketplace’s constituent relations come together. Returning to Sack (2003) awareness of the interconnections and interrelations that reproduce place is generally foreshortened, often by consumption, and the seemingly inherent contradictions of the marketplace. Other practices associated with commodities and commodity fetishism that have come to define cities (Pile 2005) routinely intertwine with place-­ making (Goss 1999; Gottdiener 2000). Therefore, revealing the social

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relations hidden by the commodity and displaced by commodity fetishism entails revealing the ways in which place itself is implicated in its social as well as material and discursive constitution. Approaches that interrogate commodities and commodity fetishism, however, tend to focus on the interplay between ‘object in motion’ and ‘commodity context’ (Kopytoff 1988). The role of place is implied insofar as commodities travel from place to place, changing forms and gaining value(s) (Gregson et al. 2010), or as commodities articulate the relationships across and between one place and another (Coles 2013). Taking on a moral imperative to unveil the commodity fetish, topo/ graphy, on the other hand, shifts the focus away from the commodity, and onto the assembly of places, and the ways in which their assembly is obscured by place-making. It traces out the interconnections that contribute to the making of place—for example, by ‘following’ the ‘people’, ‘things’, ‘metaphors’, ‘plot[s]’ and so on (Marcus 1995). Critically, however, it also examines and aims to articulate the ‘loom-like processes’ that weave together place’s constituent relations (Sack 1992). As it writes place, topo/graphy thus unravels the place-fetish, illustrating the ways in which it is embedded in the very practices whereby place(s) are valued, fashioned and reproduced. The stylistic presentation of topo/graphy in this book is deliberate. Specifically, it seeks to contrast often sterile and abstract explanations of markets and economies with the innate senses of liveliness and sensuousness that being in and part of the marketplace entails. Evoking these senses, I suggest, is necessary to recount a marketplace but also to convey the ways in which the sensuality of marketplace motivates its economic position—rather than emerging from it (or vice versa). Chapter 5 engages with this notion more fully. To these ends, it takes the figurative language that Marx and Marxist scholars use to describe and interrogate the occult-­ like machinations of capitalism at face value to illustrate the ways in which marketplaces are implicated in them. Thus, as it appears here, the topo/ graphy’s written style intentionally evokes the interaction(s), confusion and sometimes mysticism that being in and part of a marketplace entails, particularly as they are sensed, or otherwise confronted by the bodies that produce, consume and otherwise experience them. Topo/graphy, however, is not solely an approach to writing or representation. Rather topo/graphy is methodology that combines writing with other modes of interrogation to engage conceptually and methodologically with place. In service to this engagement, it is an approach by

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which empirical materials are drawn together—gathered, collated and analysed to effect its (re)presentations. The topo/graphy that informs this book is generated by ongoing research in one London marketplace, Borough Market, and is comprised of a range of materials and methods. These include field notes from intensive participant observation spanning seven years (nearly four of which were spent almost continuously in Borough Market as a researcher, trader, consumer and tourist; nearly 3600 catalogued photographs that cover nearly all times of day, week and year in the marketplace; sound-recordings of the marketplace covering similar periods as the photography; ‘site-writing’ (Rendell 2010), transcripts from 60 or so semi-structured interviews (ranging from 30  minutes to 2 hours)—and notes from countless informal chats, and archival materials that include a range of letters, newspapers, policy documents and maps that document and chart Borough Market’s histories over the last few hundred years. Additionally, in a nod towards the interconnectivity of place(s) field notes, site-writings, interviews, photographs and other materials from sites further afield from Borough Market inform this topo/ graphy. These sites include ruined agri-industrial landscapes, shipping ports, industrial farms, abattoirs, food distribution centres and supermarkets. The importance of these becomes apparent when considering Borough Market’s reproduction, and the interconnectivity through time and space, which likewise has a hand in its reproduction. The topo/graphy brings these materials together into a (re)presentation of Borough Market, in separate cuts, each focusing on a particular aspect of the marketplace: its material-semiotics, its commodity cultures and its social-sensuality. Taken separately, each cut corresponds to these particular aspects and to place’s particular constituent relations. Taken together as a whole, however, these cuts come together into a writing of the marketplace.

To the Market(place)… The rest of this book is organized along these lines (Fig.  1.3). Chapter 2 further introduces Borough Market, the market and marketplace where the central arguments of this book are developed. It explains the relevance of this particular example in examining the complex dynamics between market and marketplace, and explains the importance of understanding these dynamics through the lenses of place and place-making, which highlight the material, social-spatial, temporal and imaginative practices that

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Fig. 1.3  To market, to market…

reproduce such marketplaces and markets. It explains the ways in which urban marketplaces such as Borough Market once played an important role in food provisioning for the City. Typically occupying positions on the urban periphery, they served as a key interface between urban and rural economies. With changing systems of food provision and urban political and cultural economies more generally, as well as broader shifts in the tastes and expectations of urban residents and consumers, such marketplaces are increasingly valued for the consumer culture and experiences of consumption they seemingly engender, rather than for their roles in food provision. This chapter details the history of Borough Market and contextualizes it as part of broader economic, social and cultural change within the city. It also presents the marketplace’s re-emergence as a fine and alternative food market, positioning it parallel to new and emergent forms of ‘alternative’ food production and consumption, and the ways by which these have transformed marketplaces as sites of urban consumer culture increasingly orientated towards conspicuous consumption.

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Following on from the previous, Chap. 3 examines the meanings embedded in the material culture of the marketplace (as visible in Borough Market’s built environment and specialized stall displays). It argues that a market-wide system of meanings (e.g. semiotics) emerges as individual elements of material culture assemble together. This material-semiotic shapes meanings about foods’ production and consumption and comes to  bracket consumption in the marketplace.  The material-semiotic  provides  the backdrop to the marketplace’s social-sensuality that  characterizes, and ultimately governs commodity exchange. Like many such marketplaces, Borough Market has a distinctive visual aesthetic. Derived from a material culture that incorporates objects, signage and photography as well as timeworn building materials, and coupled with an architecturally notable and historic built environment, this material culture mobilizes individual temporal and spatial, and otherwise geographical meanings and imaginations about foods’ provenance. As these are drawn together within the space of the marketplace, however, these meanings and imaginations slip, becoming generalized to the marketplace and its cultures of consumption. Drawing from literatures concerned with materiality and the material ‘turn’, this chapter traces the disparate meanings of the marketplace embedded in its material culture, interrogates the ways in which various forms of social-sensuality emerge from their assembly into a material-semiotic and examines the ways in which these materialities and meanings combine to provide the ‘architecture’ from which commodities are valued and the market is made. At their heart, markets and marketplaces are about the negotiation, valuation and exchange of things—commodities. Generating the space of the market—a market-space (Bestor 2004)—these things have geographies that extend the marketplace to a constellation of other places associated with their production. Yet in Borough Market, these geographies only become important when they are reproduced and performed vis-à-vis their discursive production and consumption in the marketplace. Chapter 4 adopts a ‘following’ approach (Marcus 1995) and follows the thing(s) (Cook 2004), as well as the place(s) and geography(ies) (Coles 2013) of objects that become commodities in the marketplace. Specifically, it follows coffee, a staple commodity of Borough Market from its places of origin, where specialist buyers seek out coffees of distinctive provenance, to the roasting facilities where the qualities of such provenance are physically inscribed into the materiality of the coffee, to the point of retail and consumption in the marketplace where these qualities are translated into value(s), and ultimately realized. The chapter uses this example of coffee

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to argue that as important as these material geographies are to value of commodities in the marketplace, they matter only insofar as they are made apparent, and thus realizable through negotiation and exchange  in the marketplace. If commodities are at the heart of the marketplace, then buying and selling them makes the market. This chapter brings literatures associated with puissance (Maffesoli 1996), the sensual turns in social sciences, and embodiment, ingestion and consumption (Abbots 2017) together to illustrate how social-sensual relations fashioned through buying and selling transform consumption in the marketplace into a multisensory experience of place in which the marketplace is consumed alongside its commodities. In particular, this chapter interrogates the ways in which vendors develop social-sensual relationships with customers to facilitate the commodity transactions that make the marketplace a market. It explores how this social-sensuality in the marketplace combines with the marketplace’s material semiotic to spread throughout the marketplace, transforming it into a consumptive experience, and it examines the ways in which this experience leads to the senses of vibrancy, conviviality and buzz that fuel the reproduction of the market and marketplace. By way of conclusions, Chap. 6 reassembles the marketplace. It argues that it is essential for geographers to revisit place and place-making, which has often been overlooked in recent geographical literatures—particularly in those associated with urban markets. Focusing particularly on notions vibrancy, conviviality and buzz, it argues that with wider social, cultural and political shifts within the urban landscape, it is critical to understand the roles that particular places like marketplaces play in generating these ephemera—especially as they occupy prominent positions within academic-, lay- and policy debate. Drawing conclusions, the chapter also summarizes the central contributions of the book, explores the potential for topo/graphy as a mode of place-based analysis for marketplaces and beyond, and highlights potential avenues further work.

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CHAPTER 2

Positioning Borough Market as Market and Marketplace

Abstract  This chapter introduces the case study through which the arguments of this book are developed: London’s Borough Market. It explains the relevance of this particular example in examining the complex dynamics between market and marketplace, and explains the importance of understanding these dynamics through the lenses of place and place-­making, which highlight the material, social-spatial, temporal and imaginative practices that reproduce such marketplaces and markets. Urban marketplaces such as Borough Market once played an important role in food provisioning for the City. Typically occupying positions on the urban periphery, they served as a key interface between urban and rural economies. With changing systems of food provision and urban political and cultural economies more generally, as well as broader shifts in the tastes and expectations of urban residents and consumers, such marketplaces are increasingly valued for the consumer culture and experiences of consumption they seemingly engender, rather than for their roles in food provision. This chapter details the history of Borough Market and contextualizes it as part of broader economic, social and cultural change within the city. It charts the marketplaces history as a key food market for London, and its decline in the last half of the twentieth century. It also presents the marketplace’s re-emergence as a fine and alternative food market in parallel to new and emergent forms of

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‘alternative’ food production and consumption, and the ways which they have transformed marketplaces as sites of urban consumer culture increasingly orientated towards conspicuous consumption. Keywords  Marketplace • Food • Food politics • Alternative food • Commodity fetishism

A Field in Chorleywood An overgrown field is adjacent to the cricket pitch in Chorleywood, located just outside London’s M-25. Dotted with some old concrete foundations that mark the outlines of old buildings, this field looks like any other industrial site. Its importance to food is not readily apparent. The ruins in this field, however, are what is left from the Flour Milling and Research Association at Chorleywood (FMRAC). FMRAC is the birthplace of what has become known as the Chorleywood Bread Process (CBP), a baking process developed in the 1960s that draws from contemporaneous agricultural, micro-biological and manufacturing technologies to produce bread as efficiently and inexpensively as possible. These ruins thus represent a point of convergence (DeSilvey and Edensor 2013), where a myriad of forces and interests associated with industrialized food production, manufacturing, distribution and consumption coalesce to redefine British food provision through the motivational lenses of agri-capitalism (Coles 2016a, b). Visible in a myriad of foodstuffs, including bread, meat, fruit and vegetables and the multitudes of packaged products that stock supermarket shelves, efficiency and cost-effectiveness are epoch defining values that have come to shape a world-spanning political economy of food, which in turn has come to reshape Earth-system processes (Bennett et al. 2018; McGregor and Houston 2018). FMRAC’s decayed foundations serve as a powerful reminder of the spectral alchemy that emanates from foods’ continued drive towards commodities and commoditization over the last half century, as well as its enduring effects into the next. These ruins also serve as a useful, albeit counter-topographic (Katz 2001), entry point into Borough Market. A baker, ‘Matt’, who owns and operates Borough Market’s most prominent bakery and bakery stall, and figures prominently in the following chapter, sent me to this place. Matt self-identifies as a ‘real baker’ because he bakes ‘proper bread…using only flour, water, salt and yeast, and nothing else’. This tagline is repeated

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often, and is figures prominently on the bakery’s marketing literature. Matt does not refer to bread produced through the CBP as ‘proper bread’, or ‘bread at all’, preferring ‘baked wheat product’ instead. Such products, especially ‘sliced white’ were developed to optimize the use of new, hybrid strains of wheat and a range of enzymatic leavening and processing agents, fortifiers and preservatives, as well as high-speed mixers, and ovens. The result is that the CBP enables the production of bread—from raw materials to a ready-sliced loaf packed in a plastic bag—in about an hour. Virtually everything that fills the bread aisles of the UK’s supermarkets, including packets of rolls, baps, wraps, pitas, tortillas and muffins, uses the technologies behind the CBP. The products resulting from the CBP’s development, and the social-­ technological imagination that underlies them, comprise a wider political economy of food. Initially orientated towards ensuring domestic supply and food-security in a post-war era, CBP and other practices and processes that seek to optimize production through technology represents a culmination of Green Revolution scientific technologies. These productivist-­ orientated practices combine cutting-edge cropping, harvesting and other modes of agricultural production with innovations in manufacturing, logistics and retail. They were developed to address serious, worldwide concerns over food security by endeavouring to ensure an adequate food supply. At the same time, however, these practices represent a marriage between extremely powerful state interests and corporate actors, who have conspired to commoditize nearly all aspects of food provision and reduce food into commodities (Winders  2009). Such commoditization has wide-­ ranging effects, the most significant of which is the transformation from objects with a range of use values, which are derived from deeply embedded and culturally significant socio-metabolic relationships with (N)ature (see Smith 1984) into commodities for exchange in the market. In the process, they endeavour to render (N)ature obsolete by a techno-science that mitigates (and in many instances eliminates) the effects of biophysical processes (e.g. seasonality, pests, drought and decomposition). The result is an agri-capitalist provision system that ‘pulverizes’ a diverse food landscape, comprised of a rich variety of world-regional foodstuffs, traditions and cultures, into a corporatized ‘placeless foodscape (Ilbery and Kneafsey 2000), made up of only handful of agriculture commodities whose values pertain only to their exchangeability on the market. This system is predicated upon an further political economy of cheap agricultural inputs derived

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from oil and cheap labour that fetishises efficiency, but only insofar as it enables the maximization of profits (Coles 2016a, b). Such inefficiencies, including labour, waste, pollution and other risks to profit-making potential, are subsequently ‘fixed’ through displacement of costs and externalization of risk (Harvey 1982). Systemic inefficiencies, which materialize as polluting greenhouse gas emissions, are further externalized into the commons (Sassen 2014). Emerging from what ultimately becomes a tension between competing social spatial imaginaries, Borough Market’s retail market, the fine-foods market that this book is ostensibly about, came about in the late 1990s. It is comprised of disparate traders who consolidated from a monthly farmer’s market into a weekly, and then daily, food market, all on the premises of a marketplace and market hall that has been around since at least the early nineteenth century. Archival materials place a marketplace in Borough Market’s present location from the mid-eighteenth century. And anecdotal materials suggest a marketplace has been located nearby in the Borough of Southwark for many hundreds of years, occupying the roadway into the City of London from the South. In this sense, it has been always outside the city’s jurisdiction. Borough Market’s most recent iteration replaces a declining wholesale market for fruit and vegetables that occupied the site for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and supplied much of London’s green grocery and restaurant trade. Large-scale shifts in the political economy of food have led to the consolidation of power within the food system into the hands of relatively few corporate actors, and the domination of supermarkets in food retail. Borough Market’s wholesale market found itself in near-terminal decline. Yet, because agri-capitalism is crises prone, the series of scandals and scares that rocked UK agriculture shook consumer confidence, and consequently ushered in an era of producers and consumers who sought alternatives to what was perceived to be unstable, unsustainable and, in some instances, dangerous modes of food provision. Some of these producers and many of these consumers became some of Borough Market’s earliest proponents. Borough Market has thus always aligned itself with alternatives to agri-­ capitalism, finding itself, and later positioning itself, as peripheral to more mainstream food economies and, by extension, peripheral to more mainstream political economy more generally. This juxtaposition however is relational. Borough Market depends on agri-capitalism in order for it to be an alternative to it. Thus, the spatiality of relational flows that comprises agri-capitalism, likewise comprises Borough Market’s spatiality of

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dense, meaning rich material, social, sensual and discursive relationships. This chapter explores the tensions between what appear to be competing visions for the same space: a topology comprised of emanations of relations and power (Allen 2016), and a topography comprised of spaces and relations unfolding from the interrelations of place (Malpas 2012). It resolves this tension by considering the ever-evolving market, and its need to refashion itself in order to accommodate new ways of valuing and exchanging commodities.

Re/Placing Food Traces of the placeless foodscape and its origins within an agri-capitalist production system are contained within the ruins at Chorleywood. Though this system has come to dominate food provision worldwide, its dependence on an unsustainable supply of raw materials and a petrol economy predicated upon cheap energy—at least in its upfront costs—raises questions over its long-term viability. Indeed, the supposed efficiencies generated by the logic of tightly coupled, ‘lean’ supply chains that derive value from spatial inequality are not only costly in terms of social and ecological justice (see Goodman and Watts 1997; Morgan et al. 2008); they lie at the heart of any number of recent food-related scares, panics and crises (Law 2006; Abbots and Coles 2013; Jackson et al. 2013). Yet, as Marxist commentators have long noted, capitalism has a remarkable capacity to overcome such crises by generating new modes of exchange value, new commodities and new markets. Borough Market is one such market and marketplace. From its inception in the late 1990s, Borough Market positioned itself as the antithesis of the distanced material and social relations and seeming placeless-ness associated with agri-capitalism. Indeed, agri-capitalism pursues value through modern technoscience and modernist vestiges of technological efficiency. These technologies include seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides designed to work in conjunction with each other to maximize crop yields whilst minimizing the time it takes from planting to harvesting. They also include a range of ‘coordinating technologies’ (see Hand and Shove 2007), such as refrigeration, logistics and supply chain management, and legal regimes. These technologies combine with shifts away from government and to governance, and tightly coupled relationships between state, public, private and philanthropic scientific and political institutions to comprise what Patel (2013) refers to as the ‘long’ Green

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Revolution (see also Nally and Taylor 2015). Significantly, these socio-­ technological assemblies are designed and come together to overcome geographical frictions of distance, seasonality and other Natures, as well as social, political and ethical-moral governance that might otherwise inhibit agri-capitalism’s reproduction, and subsume them into a Newtonian ‘thing-logic’. This logic replicates ‘market society in nature’ and ‘nature in market society’—and consummates Newton’s ‘“mechanical principles” of union into a holy and scientifically impervious truth of all being (Taussig 1980: 34)’. The result is a geopolitical economy for food centred on the productivist logic of capitalism and the expansionist logic of American imperialist and corporatist agendas (McMichael 2013). These logics not only indulge the self-interests of state, institutional and corporate actors, they fashion space (and time) into a singular, modernist vision for rationalization that enables its partition, ordering and management (Scott 1999). It is important to stress that such rationalization does not endeavour to increase the efficiency of agricultural production in its own rights, but rather to maximize its commodity potential. Hence, under agri-capitalism’s corporatist food regime (McMichael 2005), mixed cropping systems are replaced by mono-crops; biological and genetic diversity of plants and animals is reduced into a few phenotypes selected for particular traits (e.g. high-­ yields, more/less protein and ease of processing); previously long growth cycles are substantially fore-shortened, and the rich variety of foodstuffs, from a diversity of regions, is condensed into a relatively few number of food-commodities, all in the name of a spatial and temporal efficiency that drives for exchange values and services the market (Coles 2016b). Within the spatial-logic of the commodity, senses of nature, meaning and social relations, or indeed senses of place, time and geography, which long dominate the language and practice of food and agriculture are stripped away. What remains is a modernist food landscape that, though not placeless per se, is comprised of a constellation of ubiquitous and seemingly banal non-places (Augé 1995): geometrically regularized fields that facilitate geo-located mechanized planting and harvesting of mono-­ crops; abattoirs and slaughterhouses that transform living, sentient animals into container-ready packaged meat; grain terminals and ports, bulk shipping containers, as well as rationalized transport networks that connect distant sites of production to distant factories and markets, and distribution centres where the material output from far-flung sites of production coalesce before they are shipped as finished products to

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consumers waiting in the aisles of supermarkets. This foodscape is further coordinated and articulated by distant actors, likewise located, each seeking to leverage use and exchange values to serve still further distant economic actors and markets. Because food is vital to maintaining biological life, and thus to the social reproduction of labour, however its commodity potential is more than its exchangeability as commodities. Rather, it extends to its capacity to generate more commodities and more capital. Staples like bread, for instance, function as ‘wage-goods’ (Goodman and Redclift 1991) and comprise part of a ‘basket’ of commodities whose price is tied to inflation rates and minimum wages for labour (Harvey 2014). The assumption is that the contents of this basket meet the minimum requirements for the social reproduction of labour, and that labourers’ wages are sufficient enough to afford them. In a complication of commodity logic, in which use values are superseded by exchange values, the exchange value of food in this case resides in its usability as fuel for the bodies whose (socially necessary) labour comprises the values of the commodities for which they labour. This tension within the use and exchange values of food is a point of contention within struggles between capital and labour over wages and the length of a working day (Harvey 1982: 53), and makes food a tool for the social and political control of working populations (Nally 2011). Enabled by its techno-scientific and sociopolitical assemblies, the spatial logic of agri-capitalism further optimizes the commodity potential of food by removing much of the human labour power required for its production, and (dis)placing it onto these assemblies. Returning to Matt, the baker, he comments that the logic of the CBP, which produces fast and cheap bread, likewise enables supermarkets to deploy ‘sliced white’ as a loss leader—for example, sold at prices below the cost of production to entice consumers into the shops with the assumption that they will make up the difference in lost profits through the purchase of products. Because of how it is made, such baked wheat products—according to Matt— already have questionable nutritional value (e.g. use value). Matt notes particularly that the speed at which its primary ingredients (e.g. wheat) is produced as well as that of the production of the final product itself hinders the development of nutrients and necessitates the incorporation of further additives. To emphasize the point, he comments that ‘the stuff is basically worthless’. He is quick to point out that by contrast, his bread in Borough Market ‘from wheat to finished loaf…takes time’—the implication being that time, in antithesis to speed, maximizes nutrient development, taste and quality, and thus value.

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Thinking through the notion of a ‘worthless’ foodstuff is important. Akin to bread’s—and other foodstuff’s—position as wage goods or as loss leaders, the spatial logic of agri-capitalism finalizes the commoditization of food. What I mean by this is that such foods’ value under this regime resides in its capacity to generate new capital, be it through the corporeal reproduction of labour, or as a lure for other commodity transactions. This form of exchange value of course is tied to foods’ use value as calorie delivery systems, but ultimately speaks to the market’s capacity to shift and modify the way(s) such value are deployed—in order to maximize the exchange of commodities and the generation of capital. The spatial logic that results in agri-capitalism’s seemingly ‘placeless’ foodscape (or at least a foodscape made up of a seemingly endless constellation of non-places) enables the market to manipulate values to serve its purposes. The space over which the market itself is comprised enables it to occupy corporeal and spectral worlds whilst at the same time colonize new sites into its expanded spatiality (Guthman 2015). Unsurprisingly, agri-capitalism’s underlying spatial logic maps onto a spatiality comprised of ‘topologies of flows’ used to define and describe the circulations of globalized capitalism (Amin and Cohendet 2004). These spaces of course are not placeless, but rather are comprised of spatially distant actors, operating in a myriad of hyper-connected places. When examined closely, each place would no doubt be rich with meaningful material and social relations. However, their individuality as places appears less important than their interconnection and organization through which they act and which makes them appear placeless (Allen 2016). This is perhaps one reason why ethnographic accounts so often focus on the counter-topographies of power wielded from a distance as it touches down to impact particular peoples, places and environments (Katz 2001), but also why it is vital to focus, ethnographically or otherwise, on the individual and collective places where such power is generated. Borough Market, and others like it, actively fashions such images of placeless-ness and of the constellation of non-places that comprises agri-­ capitalism in order to position itself as a placed alternative. Borough Market achieves its position by seeking to (re)embed foodstuffs, and importantly their consumption, with senses of meaning, and place, and thereby generating a market for commodities that derives exchange value through a semiotic as well as material reversal of the values sought by agricapitalism. Materially each of the commodities in the marketplace have some kind of readily identifiable geographical provenance. In direct

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contrast to the seemingly placeless commodities of supermarkets that sit ‘mute’ on its shelves (see Harvey 1990), such provenance offers a biography of the commodity that, at least superficially, extends the geographical imagination of consumers to the regions, places and traditions of its production. Akin to Cook and Crang’s (1996) notion of double commodity fetishism (see also Coles and Crang 2011), the coming together of geographical materiality and geographical imagination is commoditized. As Goodman (2004: 898) comments, such foodstuffs are ‘commoditized through two inseparable and interrelated production moments:(1) the moment of socio-ecological [material] production and (2) the moment of discursive/semiotic production’. Thus, values of the commodities exchanged on the trading floor are derived from how these materialities and imaginations, that is to say the places, spaces and geographies of their production, are represented through the reproduction of the marketplace. In short, the commodities that make Borough Market do not appear in the marketplace as commodities. Rather, they appear as foods that come from somewhere, and that somewhere is important to their qualities, and ultimately the values that comprise the commodity. A system of meanings in the marketplace makes these connection(s) between a foodstuff’s identifiable geography and its qualities, and enables its imagined geographies to be valued. These semiotics not only hide the commodity; they hide its commoditization and the market at large behind their imagined geographies, giving the impression that foods, rich with meaning, are traded at the marketplace, rather than commodities exchanged in the market. Because there is no reason why meanings are not, or cannot be, attached to commodities regardless of where they are traded, this is a fiction. However, it is a useful fiction to the reproduction of Borough Market because it enables the marketplace to redeposit commodities, exchange and value within its own narratives of place that can be shaped, fashioned and controlled by market actors as they reproduce the market.

Placing Alternatives In generating and maintaining such fictions, Borough Market sets up a binary between place and non-place that ascribes meanings and materialites to the former, whilst leaving the latter to be ambiguously defined. Legitimating its market function as an alternative that associated with

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agri-­capitalism, this binary enables the marketplace to continuously redefine itself in relation to its own self-generated geographies. Holloway et al. (2007:2) caution against ascribing dualisms such as ‘commodity’ and ‘food’, or ‘alternative’ and ‘conventional’ onto food systems, arguing that they should be fashioned through the ‘emergent effects of actors’ own discourses and practices’. Borough Market, and actors therein, however, enthusiastically pursue them. For example, rather than the logic technoscience that supplants the natural interactions between yeast and sugar, which leavens bread, with laboratory-based biochemical reactions, Matt the baker relies on time, nature and reimagined tradition. These give his products desirable aesthetic and material characteristics which translate into exchange values in the marketplace, and then hide them behind their very imagined materialities. Juxtapositions between conventional and alternative, speed and time, modernity and tradition, place and placeless, and indeed foodstuff and commodity are thus not only present in the Borough Market, they provide the basis on which its foodstuffs are transformed into commodities, and summarily their values are negotiated. By extension, Matt and the other vendors, traders and producers, whose products comprise the market, construct a marketplace as a place that seemingly addresses the perceived wrongs of agri-capitalism and the existential dangers of a placeless foodscape that come with it. Such a place, in turn, provides the basis on which Borough Market subsequently differentiates itself from more mainstream food provision, as well as the moral authority on which it passes judgement on these systems and fashions itself as an alternative. These dualities also position Borough Market into long-running academic and lay debates focused on the relationship between ‘alternative’ food networks and initiatives (AFNs and AFIs), which seek to constitute food provision through ethics of care and responsibility, and more conventional modes of agri-capitalist food provision, which are ostensibly motivated solely by the logic of commodities. Beyond Borough Market, such ‘alternative’ foods are typically characterized as falling outside more conventional agri-capitalist food systems through their individual material and discursive practices. These tend to highlight discursive connections between consumers and producers (Raynolds 2003; Hinrichs 2016), which are typically lost, as well as articulate equitable power relationships between places of consumption and places of production. As within Borough Market, discursive and material practices of individual AFIs and AFNs incorporate and connect alternative places of

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production and consumption, articulate shared ethics about production and consumption, and in the process generate active and tacit critiques of agri-­capitalism. Vigorous ethical debates over how food ought to be produced and consumed likewise stem from this emergent alternative/conventional dualism (see: Guthman 2002; Kirwan 2004) resulting in a fractious, and ambiguously defined sense of alternative, positioned against a seemingly hegemonic agri-capitalism (Gibson-Graham 2006). Such vague and indistinct characterizations enable Borough Market to align AFNs and AFIs in the general sense, giving it agency to shape how such debates play out through its material and discursive practices. This affords Borough Market the opportunity to further differentiate its market functions from those of more conventional modes of food provision, and legitimate the practices that make it a market and marketplace. It is important to stress that for Borough Market, this implied alignment with AFIs and AFNs is as much sociopolitical objective and product of historical and economic happenstance as it is a means and strategy to derive a market for itself from either agri-capitalism or other possible competing interests. Much of this strategic alignment is tied to broader shifts in economic, political and cultural landscapes of cities. Such fashioning of dualities, alongside Borough Market’s implied alliance with AFIs and AFNs, is critical to its reproduction as they differentiate it from supermarkets and other modes of food provision. Equally important in this process of differentiation, however, is that alongside the juxtaposition of foods’ placed geographical imaginations with the non-­ places of commodities, the foodstuffs that comprise Borough Market have different materialities and geographies to their more conventional counterparts as well. And, as the next chapter addresses, these geographies and imaginations are made apparent through a distinctive visual-material culture of display that enables the commoditization of these properties and imaginations, and transforms Borough Market into a marketplace of images, imaginations and experiences, which come attached to the consumption of food (and place) in the city.

Placing Urban Marketplaces Urban marketplaces, especially food markets such as Borough Market, once played an important role in urban food provisioning. Typically occupying positions on the urban peripheries, they served as an important interface where urban and rural economies come together. Such

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marketplaces, as well as markets and notions of ‘the marketplace’ as abstractions, mediate the relations between economic production— namely, socio-­metabolic relationships with (N)ature and the processes by which value (as socially necessary labour time) is inscribed into commodities and consumption—the practices by which such relations and values are negotiated and ultimately realized (Harvey 2014). This makes marketplaces and markets in both senses key places (or spaces in the abstract) in the geographies of commodities, and thus the geographies that define economies. With changing modes of food provision in cities, and urban political and cultural economies more generally, the roles of such marketplaces have shifted from purely sites of mediation and exchange to places whereby market functions are bound up in the social-sensual experiences of being in and part of a marketplace (Probyn 2011). Returning to Chap. 1 of this book, one of this book’s main objectives is to utilize topo/graphy to interrogate the tensions between the market as a site of commodity transaction and exchange, the marketplace as a place that enables such exchange to occur, and processes of place and place-making whereby such markets and marketplaces emerge. Part and parcel to changes to food provision in cities and their political, cultural and economic landscapes more generally are still broader shifts in the tastes and expectations of urban residents and consumers. As such, marketplaces are increasingly valued for the consumer culture and experiences of consumption they engender, rather than solely for their roles in food provision or in economic functionality. The rest of this chapter details the history of Borough Market and contextualizes it as part of broader economic, social and cultural change within the city. It charts the marketplaces history as a key food market for London, its decline in the last half of the twentieth century. It also considers the historical and economic happenstance that enabled its more recent re-emergence as a fine-foods market in parallel to new and emergent forms of ‘alternative’ food production and consumption, and the ways which it uses its own sense of alterity to differentiate as well as reproduce itself as a market and marketplace. Borough Market and the City Literally as well as metaphorically, Borough Market is located, at least in part, under the city of London. Its quasi-subterranean urban environment, comprised of railway viaducts, arcade-like galleries and catacombs

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lends the marketplace an underground feel, which extends to an identity amongst its users. For the marketplace’s earliest vendors and self-identified original shoppers, many of whom were part of its nascent resurgence as a fine-foods market, Borough Market was and remains a ‘special’ and ‘secret place’, there for ‘those in know’, seeking out ‘good food’, knowing where to get it.1 This is despite, or perhaps because of, the thousands of people who flock to the marketplace each week. In its early days as a rough-and-­ ready retail market, Borough Market was the place to go in London in order to buy foodstuffs that were otherwise unavailable in British supermarkets. These days, owing to broader changes in tastes and desires for food, many of themes and aesthetics of food pioneered in places like Borough Market have been adopted and appropriated by more mainstream food provision. Borough Market’s relationships to rest of the city, however, are complex. Wider London has always provided its customer base and, by extension, its capital. Likewise, documentary evidence located in the City of London Archives suggest that Borough Market has long been known as ‘London’s Larder,’—initially providing fruit and vegetables to the city’s green grocers and restaurants, and then becoming a hub for specialized foodstuffs, a hub of the city’s food and foodie culture (Choo 2017). Discourses of alterity resulting from a position on the periphery are further reinforced by Borough Market’s institutional relationships with the Corporation of London. Borough Market has always been outside the city, but also always in the way of the city. Recent railway developments that saw parts of the marketplace demolished to improve connectivity between central London railway stations and commuter suburbs in the Southeast of England, are just the latest in a series of power negotiations between the market and the city that feeds it. The inception of Borough Market (according to the market’s lore) occurred by Act of Parliament in 1756. This act was the last of three concerning the marketplace (in that year). The chief reason that the market gained the attention of Parliament and warranted an act in the first place was that its physical location, formerly on Borough High Street but spilling onto old London Bridge, impeded travel into the city, whilst simultaneously its operation outside the city boundaries cost the London Corporation of Guilds tax revenues  These are ‘key terms’ that kept appearing in different interviews and informal chats with vendors and shoppers. 1

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for goods. The first act of Parliament concerning Borough Market was to actually dissolve it and move it off the street and bridge. Subsequent acts, including the ‘famous’ 1756 act, re-formed the market in its present location as a ward of Southwark parish. Subsequent acts to these solidified its right to trade and the conventions under which the market paid taxes and duties to the Crown and church (Dean et al. 2004).2 All of this is to say that Borough Market has always sought to appear as acting outside the city, and its conventions of contemporary political economy. Reflecting on the origins of Borough Market, and on the recent histories of the Borough of Southwark, and London more widely, one anonymous source suggests that the late 1990s were boom years for London’s economy. As Borough Market (re)emerged with a ‘fine foods retail market, ... the City was likewise experiencing a large wave of migrants from Europe (particularly France, Italy and Spain).’ These migrants, many with well-paying city jobs, had disposable income and were able, and, importantly, willing, to spend their money on what for them were foods from home. A different vendor puts in simply: ‘they just wanted to shop like they could in their home towns [in markets] and eat their favourite foods.’ Indeed, amongst the first retail vendors at Borough Market were stalls specializing in Spanish, French and Italian regional foodstuffs,3 which were often staffed by people from these regions, speaking a common language and trading in a shared social capital. At the same time, Borough Market vendors recognized a growing market opportunity for lunchtime fast food, which utilized ingredients from the fine-foods market to purvey foodstuffs that were far different from a lunchtime foodscape otherwise dominated by chain sandwich shops and delis. Borough Market’s clientele, particularly during this period, was comprised of nearby office workers, many of whom worked within London’s creative economy and in the financial services sector, both of which are centred nearby. A-typical fast food appealed to these workers, 2  Archival materials in the London Metropolitan Archives confirm Dean, Dillon et  al.’s statement, though there are some subtleties in the acts of Parliament regarding Borough Market that simplify Dean, Dillon et al.’s reading of the market’s history. 3  Other early vendors included a ‘continental inspired’ artisan bakery, specialist cheesemongers, wine merchants and fishmongers, and, importantly, butchers who specialized in sourcing ‘rare breed’ animals while performing ‘traditional’ butchering services (cuts to order, sausage making, cooking advice, etc). The appeal of these vendors is that they provided services and food advice readily available in continental markets but not so much in London.

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and Borough Market’s vendors provided out-of-the-ordinary food that could be purchased in an environment that was unlike anything else. Additionally, as well as appealing to a more specialized ‘foodie’ culture, Borough Market appeased a contemporaneous awareness and concern for food and food provenance amongst its largely middle-class customer base who not only cared but could afford to care about food origins. Disease (Law 2006), food scares (Stassart and Whatmore 2003; Whatmore et al. 2003; Freidberg 2003) and ensuing moral panics (Jackson 2010) were seemingly  endemic to the UK during the 1990s. Borough Market’s vendors, many of whom were profoundly impacted by foot-and-­ mouth disease, emerged in a strong position to counteract these agricultural crises by purveying foodstuffs that, by its very nature and materialities, came from outside the agricultural system that had been the basis for concern in the first place. In addition, as another vendor explains, people— predominantly the same middle-class consumers who cared about provenance—were travelling more frequently to continental Europe for holidays. As they were exposed to a more ‘European’ mode of food provision, one predicated upon ‘local’/‘regional’ and ‘seasonal’ produce and daily trips to the marketplace—notions that fits neatly into popular discourses about European marketplaces (see De La Pradelle 2006; Tchoukaleyska 2013)—there was a sense of wanting to recreate their holiday experiences upon returning home. In terms of selection, type and variety of foodstuff, and importantly for Borough Market and its traders, (perceived) quality, Borough Market was and remains well positioned to fulfil these desires. Borough Market’s relationship with the city is deeper than the ‘mere’ purveyance of exotic/authentic/quality/safe food/commodities for wealthy yet homesick/adventurous/scared consumers. Though the food it provided at its onset was important to building a customer base, looking solely to affluent ‘foodie culture’ ignores its position ‘under’ the city. This position sets the stage for its narratives about alterity and consumption to emerge by providing for its supposedly underground phantasmagorias to contrast with the phantasmagorical dreaming of city life that literally passes over head (Goss 1999; Pile 2005). Borough Market is indeed ‘tucked away’ under the railway viaducts that connect London Bridge Station on the South Bank of the Thames to Blackfriars Station in the city. Its position under a city, though inexorably connected through capital and people that literally pass overhead on commuter trains, means that the market can operate, at least discursively, on

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the fringes of typical and conventional capitalism. As was put to me by another vendor, ‘my customers, bankers, destroy the world each day with the push of a button…trading here and there on their screens. They come here [to Borough Market] to experience something real and to feel better about their lives by purchasing something from a local farmer…Borough Market is a harbour for those people’. That some of those traders are very ‘distant market actors’ who perpetrate agri-capitalism, and that Borough Market for all of its ‘alternative’ discourses depends on the surplus value of the city, merely underscores the inherent spatial contradictions of commodity logic, as well as the implicit contradictions to the negotiation and exchange of values. Borough Market’s discursive and material location beneath the city, however, reinforces imaginations about a marketplace that mediates between spectral and material worlds and helps set the stage for the semiotic reversals in which meanings about foods’ material and social relations become exchangeable as commodities. Gandy (1999: 34) comments: underground urban infrastructure became a kind of repository for untamed nature, within which the innate tensions behind capitalist urbanization became magnified and distorted through the lens of middle-class anxiety. (Gandy 1999: 34) (See Gandy 2003)

In Borough Market, these anxieties point directly towards fraught food provisioning emerging from the ordering and management of space–time within the placeless-ness of agri-capitalism, and the need for security found in places that seem to turn such ordering on its head. If marketplaces are sites where social orders are maintained as well as contested (Watson 2009), then going to Borough Market requires leaving the everyday; and going underground to the site of dirt, grime or earth (Douglas 2003), and reflecting on the disordering processes of commodities and the market. As will be expanded upon later in this book, images of (N)ature, and the disorder it implies, along with place and landscape are important discourses within the marketplace. They comprise its material-semiotic, inform how commodities are valued and ultimately underlie the socialsensuality of place and consumption that ultimately generates and reproduces the market. Like with all commodities, the materiality behind such images is embedded within their material form. In Borough Market, these are celebrated as part of the commodity. Positioned in the metaphorical underground marketplace, they thus retain their imagined elemental

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purity, which is derived from the landscape and re-enacted in the wild grime of place and the marketplace. Indeed, because Borough Market is under the city, as well as traditionally outside its jurisdiction, such materialities and meanings offer a sense of authenticity juxtaposed against the phantasms of urban life. As Chap. 3 demonstrates, the marketplace builds on this juxtaposition to construct an elaborate material-semiotic that reinforces its claims to authenticity and tradition.

Conclusions: Placing the Marketplace Beginning at the ruins of the Flour Milling and Research Association at Chorleywood, one of the birthplaces of agri-capitalism and its placeless foodscape, this chapter illustrates the ways in which Borough Market positions itself as the antithesis not only to agri-capitalism, but to entire commodity system it generates and comes to represent. No longer a system of food provision per se, agri-capitalism and its socio-spatiality continues to dominate the food landscape, and controls not only how much of the world’s population eats, but how it is able to imagine eating. Borough Market, on the other hand seeks to produce and ultimately become an alternative to this vision by seeking to reinvest commodities with senses of place and meaning, and, by extension, enabling them to be more than the use/exchange values that define commodities. To achieve this position, Borough Market’s commodities come laden with meanings about place and geography, and imbeds these meanings into their very materiality. The result is a marketplace that looks and feels, and is different to agri-capitalism, purveying commodities that are materially and discursively distinctive from its more mainstream counterparts. The result is an alternative marketplace that trades in alternative foods. Yet, while agri-capitalism’s reproduction depends on its reproduction and manipulation of a spatiality comprised of relational flows, and Borough Market’s on its reproduction as a place and marketplace, these two seemingly competing visions are complementary. Moreover, they speak to capitalism’s capacity to seek and reproduce values in unique ways and novel forms, including the very manipulation of place and geography. Regardless of narratives about place and meaning, or about space and relations, Borough Market thus remains a marketplace, and its function as a market is to facilitate the exchange of values embedded the commodity. It just happens that in Borough Market, these values are coupled with narratives about place and geography, and are derived from their

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juxtaposition with the perceived placeless-ness of agri-capitalism. As elaborated in the next three chapters, Borough Market maintains this juxtaposition through a material-semiotic that fashions meanings about place and production and blends them into meanings about consumption; re-imbeds these meanings into the valuation and valuing of commodities, and ultimately translates them into a rich, sensual experience of place, where the sensuality of the marketplace is produced and consumed alongside its commodities.

References Abbots, E.-J., & Coles, B. (2013). Horsemeat-gate: The discursive production of a neoliberal food scandal. Food, Culture & Society, 16(4), 535–550. Allen, J. (2016). Topologies of power: Beyond territory and networks. Oxford/New York: Routledge. Amin, A., & Cohendet, P. (2004). Architectures of knowledge: Firms, capabilities, and communities. Oxford: Oxford University Press on Demand. Augé, M. (1995). Non-lieux. London: Verso. Bennett, C. E., Thomas, R., Williams, M., Zalasiewicz, J., Edgeworth, M., Miller, H., et al. (2018). The broiler chicken as a signal of a human reconfigured biosphere. Royal Society Open Science, 5(12), 180325. Choo, Ben (2017, June 07). ‘There’s a simple economic reason why terrorists like the London Bridge attackers can’t change our behaviour’ The Independent Retrieved from: https://www.independent.co.uk Cook, I., & Crang, P. (1996). The world on a plate. Journal of Material Culture, 1(2), 22. Coles, B. (2016a). Mixing space: Affinitive practice and the insurgent potential of food. Geographica Helvetica, 71(3), 189–197. Coles, B. (2016b). The shocking materialities and temporalities of agri-capitalism. Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, 16(3), 5–12. Coles, B., & Crang, P. (2011). Placing alternative consumption: Commodity fetishism in borough fine foods market, London. In T.  Lewis & E.  Potter (Eds.), Ethical consumption: A critical introduction (pp.  87–102). London: Routledge. Douglas, Mary. (2003) Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge. De La Pradelle, M. (2006). Market day in Provence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dean, P., Dillon, S., Green, H., & Lowe, J. (2004). The borough market book: From roots to renaissance. London: Can of Worms Press.

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DeSilvey, C., & Edensor, T. (2013). Reckoning with ruins. Progress in Human Geography, 37(4), 465–485. Freidberg, S. (2003). Cleaning up down south: Supermarkets, ethical trade and African horticulture. Social and Cultural Geography, 4(1), 17. Gandy, M. (1999). The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24(1), 23–44. Gandy, M. (2003). Concrete and clay: Reworking nature in New  York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006). A postcapitalist politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goodman, M. K. (2004). Reading fair trade: Political ecological imaginary and the moral economy of fair trade foods. Political Geography, 23(7), 891–915. Goodman, D., & Redclift, M. R. (1991). Environment and development in Latin America: The politics of sustainability. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Goodman, D., & Watts, M. (1997). Globalising food: Agrarian questions and global restructuring. London: Psychology Press. Goss, J. (1999). Once-upon-a-time in the commodity world: An unofficial guide to mall of America. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 89(1), 45075. Guthman, J. (2002). Commodified meanings, meaningful commodities: Re– thinking production–consumption links through the organic system of provision. Sociologia Ruralis, 42(4), 295–311. Guthman, J. (2015). Binging and purging: Agrofood capitalism and the body as socioecological fix. Environment and Planning A, 47(12), 2522–2536. Hand, Martin, and Elizabeth Shove (2007). “Condensing practices: Ways of living with a freezer.” Journal of Consumer Culture 7: 79–104 Harvey, David. (1982). The Limits to Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  Harvey, David. (1990) “Between space and time: reflections on the geographical imagination1.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80.3 (1990): 418–434 Harvey, David. (2014). Seventeen contradictions and the end of capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hinrichs, C. (2016). Fixing food with ideas of “local” and “place”. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 6(4), 759–764. Holloway, L., Kneafsey, M., Cox, R., Venn, L., Dowler, E., & Tuomainen, H. (2007). Beyond the ‘alternative’-‘conventional’ divide? Thinking differently about food production consumption relationships. In Alternative Food Geographies: Representation and Practice (pp. 77–93). Oxford: Elsevier. Ilbery, B., & Kneafsey, M. (2000). Registering regional speciality food and drink products in the United Kingdom: The case of PDOs and PGls. Area, 32(3), 317–325.

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Jackson, Peter. (2010) “Food stories: consumption in an age of anxiety.” Cultural geographies 17.2: 147–165. Jackson, Peter, and the Conanx Group. (2013). Food words: Essays in culinary culture. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Katz, C. (2001). Vagabond capitalism and the necessity of social reproduction. Antipode, 33(4), 709–728. Kirwan, J. (2004). Alternative strategies in the UK agro-food system: Interrogating the alterity of farmers’ markets. Sociologia Ruralis, 44(4), 395–415. Law, J. (2006). Disaster in agriculture: Or foot and mouth mobilities. Environment and Planning A, 38(2), 227–239. Malpas, J. (2012). Heidegger and the thinking of place: Explorations in the topology of being. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McGregor, A., & Houston, D. (2018). Cattle in the anthropocene: Four propositions. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 43(1), 3–16. McMichael, P. (2005). Global development and the corporate food regime. Research in Rural Sociology and Development, 11, 265. McMichael, P. (2013). Food regimes and agrarian questions. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Morgan, K., Marsden, T., & Murdoch, J. (2008). Worlds of food: Place, power, and provenance in the food chain. Oxford: Oxford University Press on Demand. Nally, D. (2011). The biopolitics of food provisioning. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36(1), 37–53. Nally, D., & Taylor, S. (2015). The politics of self-help: The Rockefeller Foundation, philanthropy and the ‘long’ Green Revolution. Political Geography, 49, 51–63. Patel, R. (2013). The long green revolution. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(1), 1–63. Pile, S. (2005). Real cities: Modernity, space and the phantasmagorias of city life. London: SAGE. Probyn, E. (2011). ‘To market, to market…’: An afterword. Continuum, 25(5), 683–685. Raynolds, L. T. (2003). The global banana trade. In Banana wars: Power, production, and history in the Americas (pp. 23–47). Durham: Duke University Press. Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, N. (1984). Uneven development: Nature. Capital, and the Production of Space, 3, 542–565. Stassart, P., & Whatmore, S. J. (2003). Metabolising risk: Food scares and the un/ re-making of Belgian beef. Environment and Planning A, 35(3), 449–462. Taussig, M. (1980). The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of NC Press.

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Tchoukaleyska, R. (2013). Regulating the farmers’ market: Paysan expertise, quality production and local food. Geoforum, 45, 211–218. Watson, S. (2009). The magic of the marketplace: Sociality in a neglected public space. Urban Studies, 46(8), 1577–1591. Whatmore, S., Stassart, P., & Renting, H. (2003). What’s alternative about alternative food networks? London: SAGE. Winders, B. (2009) The politics of food supply: US agricultural policy in the world economy. Yale: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Imagined Geographies of the Marketplace: Fashioned Materialities

Abstract  This chapter examines the meanings embedded in the material culture of the marketplace (as visible in Borough Market’s built environment and specialized stall displays). It argues that a market-wide system of meanings (e.g. semiotics) emerges as individual elements of material culture assemble together. This ‘material-semiotic’ shapes meanings about foods’ production and consumption and comes to bracket consumption in the marketplace, providing the backdrop to the marketplace’s social-­ sensuality characterizing, and ultimately governing commodity exchange. Like many such marketplaces, Borough Market has a distinctive visual aesthetic. Derived from a material culture that incorporates objects, signage and photography as well as timeworn building materials, and coupled with an architecturally notable and historically built environment, this material culture mobilizes individual temporal and spatial, and otherwise geographical meanings and imaginations about foods’ provenance. As these are drawn together within the space of the marketplace, however, these meanings and imaginations slip, becoming generalized to the marketplace and its cultures of consumption. Drawing from literatures concerned with materiality and the material ‘turn’, this chapter traces the disparate meanings of the marketplace embedded in its material culture, interrogates the ways in which various forms of social sensuality emerge from their assembly into a material-semiotic, and examines the ways in which these materialities and meanings combine to provide the ‘architecture’ from which commodities are valued and the market is made. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Coles, Making Markets Making Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72865-6_3

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Keywords  Material-semiotic • Materiality • Proxy and proximity • Commodity fetishism

A Fine Alternative for a Market Borough Market is described in its marketing literature as ‘Britain’s Most Important Fine Foods Market’. In fact, there are two markets at play in the marketplace. One is the commodity market in which money is exchanged for material goods—in this case, high-quality, ‘fine’ foodstuffs. These foodstuffs, however, are more than just food. As Mintz  (1996) reminds us, food is always more than its capacity to sustain biological life. Foodstuffs in Borough Market come laden with explicit meanings that point not only to specific markers of quality and distinction, but also to a sense of alterity that differentiates them from the more normalized products available in supermarkets. Rather than tea, for instance, one vendor sells ‘Fair Trade,’ ‘high-grown’ tea from ‘Ceylon’ [sic]; another vendor, specializing solely in tomatoes, sells ‘organic,’ ‘heirloom’ varieties from the Isle of Wight. Those who sell meat sell ‘naturally raised’, ‘rare-breeds’. Fruit and vegetables sellers highlight that their produce is ‘locally-grown,’ or from specific regions across the UK—much of which is also certified as ‘organic,’ and positioned alongside other ‘exotic’ fruits and vegetables. It is tempting to position Borough Market, and its products, within the range of ‘alternative’ food networks and initiatives that eschew supermarkets, and actively seek to remake food provision outside the conventions of agri-capitalism (Coles 2016). Such politics, however, do not quite fit in Borough Market, and given the diversity of products, each with different modes of production, vendors are not keen to be pigeonholed anyway. ‘Alternative’ instead is  according to one vendor  ‘not that supermarket shite’, which has become a common refrain around the marketplace. For Borough Market, alterity is bound up in overlapping discourses associated with quality. Despite the latter term’s multiple interpretations (see Harvey et al. 2004), quality in the marketplace signals particular production methods alongside the kindling of relationships between producers and consumers, and, importantly, the perception of such relationships (Marsden 2004). Emerging as learned experiences of taste and, importantly, as learning how to taste (Carolan 2011; Abbots 2017), quality food in the marketplace also becomes the material expression of its places of

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production (Trubek 2005) as materialized and subsequently realized within a consumer’s body. Critically within Borough Market, however, regardless of the material connections with place and production that imply quality food, and regardless of possible relationships between producers and consumers, their importance, and the importance of place and geography itself, is made visibly and viscerally apparent to consumers within the marketplace. Quality in Borough Market is thus a material and semiotic expression of its imagined and material geographies. Hence, Borough Market’s other market is a visceral market of signs and semiotics in which representations of food, geography and history assemble in the marketplace to drive its economy of quality. The two markets of course are interrelated. As discussed in the next chapter, the goods of the commodities market are produced to emphasize desirable physical properties that result in ‘quality’ produce—properties that very often are associated with their geographies (e.g. the biophysical properties of their places of origin, processes of production and the social relations that bind these together). The market of signs and semiotics mobilize imaginations of these geographies through a visual material culture that accentuates these material properties, and packages them into an exchangeable object—a commodity. Value across the marketplace is derived from both material practices of production, and discursive practices surrounding consumption that promote the physical properties of quality and enable their exchange. The internal and external dynamics of place play an important role in how these markets come together in the construction of the marketplace. As noted earlier in this book, Borough Market is set within and amongst a distinctive built environment, parts of which are historically or architecturally significant, laden with a timeless sense of history, heritage and tradition. Borough Market also has a distinctive visual material culture of display. Individual stalls are crafted from objects, signage, and photographs as well as timeworn materials that inscribe individual foodstuffs with a rich geographical language that alludes to imaginations and knowledges about place and production (Cook and Crang 1996; Coles and Crang 2011). As these materials coalesce within the space of the marketplace, a geography of proxy and proximity blurs their distinctions and ‘places’ them into a semiotic field in which individual meanings, particularly about food’s production but also Borough Market’s history, slip to become generalized meanings shared across the marketplace. Through this slippage, meanings

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about place and food production become fetishized discourses about imagined geographies of consumption. Focusing on its historicized architecture and visual material culture of display, this chapter interrogates the disparate meanings embedded within Borough Market’s material culture. It argues that as the material semiotic emerges from blended, folded, slipped and otherwise woven-together meanings, it reinforces the sense of alterity in the marketplace that in turn transforms meanings about foods’ production into commodities for consumption in the marketplace. Unravelling Borough Market’s material-­ semiotic by tracing out some of these meanings, this chapter illustrates the ways it becomes the backdrop to commodity exchange, emerging as the physical and discursive infrastructure that ultimately enables the market’s reproduction.

Material Semiotics This book uses the term ‘material semiotics’ to articulate the discourses and assemblages  of discourses present in and as a result of Borough Market’s visual material culture (Fig. 3.1). Specifically, it refers to the sets of meanings generated as the market’s built environment and its stall displays assemble to frame and contextualize the sale of the market’s commodities. The term itself is borrowed from two sets of ideas. From Sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), material semiotics describes the human and non-human interactions found within the practice and production of scientific knowledge. The concept appears as part of Actor Network Theory (ANT) and as a family of ‘tools, sensibilities and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of webs of relations in which they are located’ (Law 2007: 1) (see also Latour 2005; Law and Hassard 1999; Haraway 1997; Latour and Woolgar 1986). As part of material cultural studies, however, notions of ‘material-semiotics’ emerge as part of a wider social semiotics of objects whereby the very materiality of an object is referential to both specific and generalized meanings within culture(s) (Douglas 1994). Social semiotics comprises a complex system of contextualization through which individual objects are rendered with social and cultural significance. This significance in turn (re)produces meanings that through social processes are embedded into the object and its materiality (Ehrentraut 1994; Riggins 1994). Thrift (2008a, b), for instance, considers the different productions of aesthetic objects (see also Ranciere 2004),

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Fig. 3.1  Assembled material culture

and argues that objects themselves are imbued with both behaviours and properties—however mediated socially. This gives objects agency in the construction of their own meaning, as objects are produced through various social, material and cultural discourses. This chapter takes these concepts forward. Using the term ‘material-semiotics’ it derives its analytical capacity, particularly its capability to trace objects and their meanings, from ANT, and its theoretical capacity that sites meaning and agency from within and outside particular object, from debates surrounding material culture. Commodities make up their own semiotic system through the sign processes that underpin commodity transactions (MacCannell 1976). Eco (1976: 24–25) comments that ‘it is possible to consider the exchange of commodities as a semiotic phenomenon…because in the exchange use value…is transformed into exchange value—and therefore a process of signification or symbolization takes place…[money] stands for something else’. Borough Market is interesting because besides processes of symbolization

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that occur during exchange, symbolization (at different levels) occurs also to facilitate, mediate and, as part of a surrogacy within, exchange. As original use value is lost through this process of symbolization, ‘the commodity is free to take on a secondary use-value…[becoming free to] take on a wide range of cultural associations and illusions’ (Featherstone 1991: 14). These secondary use values attached to cultural and geographical illusions and associations make up the foundation of Borough Market’s symbolic economy, which, through the self-contained and self-generated identity and mythology promoted by Borough Market, lead to questions about what, exactly, is being consumed. McInerney (2002: 278) is concerned by a recent trend of consumers ‘showing preferences for locally-produced or regionally-branded goods…[which are discursively] a long way from generic commodity derived crops…yet many of these demand distinctions are ill-informed, based on perceptions, presumptions and image’. I argue that these images, perceptions and presumptions are themselves the product of knowledges built in places like Borough Market that mobilize material-­semiotics to construct partial imaginary geographies about itself and its constituent parts—for example, imaginative geographies about its commodities. Drawing from the multitude of sites where their values are established as ‘things in motion’ (Appadurai 1988), semiotic analysis of commodities focuses on their individual knowledges, biographies and displacements (Cook and Crang 1996; Cook et  al. 2004)—particularly as they move through space and time. Such an approach, however, tends to overlook the roles that place and place-making play in bringing multiple commodities, with multiple meanings and values together in close spatial proximity with each other. Focusing on material-semiotics and their assembly, however, draws specific attention to the roles that place, context and proximity play not only in establishing the semiotic fields (see Crang 1996) in which meanings and values are established, but also in reproducing the places where they can be established. Such semiotics of place, contribute to the reproduction of that place, and therefore to the continued (re)production of themselves. A marketplace like Borough Market is dependent on the reproduction of its semiotic, not just because meanings are intrinsic to place, but because its commodities are traded on particular meanings. Moreover, however, particular sets of meanings about place, the marketplace and consumption likewise, inform the reproduction of meanings particular to its commodities. This implies a specific relationship between coming together and

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generation of the marketplace in the material sense, and the system of meanings that emerges as a result. The following examines more closely the processes whereby meanings and materialities come together as part of the marketplace, and the ways in which such meanings blend and slip into a material-semiotic that informs the market and reproduces the marketplace.

Placement and Place: The Market’s Built Environment A collection of banners celebrating Borough Market’s 250th anniversary hang from the rafters of the market hall one Thursday evening in 2006. On this occasion, the hall is lit up drawing attention both to the banners and to the intricate iron work that supports the vaulted arcade. The lighting consultants have also worked on other historic structures around Europe, using light to accentuate particular and notable features. The overall effect is to suggest the significance of the built environment. Banners similar to these have appeared periodically over the 12 or so years that I have spent in the marketplace. They nearly always make some allusion to its age. Sources from within the marketplace date it 1000 years or more (https://boroughmarket.org.uk/history accessed July 2020). Andrew, one of the earliest vendors from the marketplace’s ‘Renaissance’ period puts it succinctly: ‘you can see from the banners upstairs that the market is, you know, historically old’ (personal communication and extract from field notes 2006). Material claims to Borough Market’s age and history, made explicit by such banners and other signage, as well as embedded into the material fabric and design of the buildings, are dispersed throughout. Because they make such overt reference to dates, in this case 1756, these banners offer an intriguing entry point into investigating the ways in which the marketplace fashions its history—a history that becomes the foundation for the system of meanings on which the marketplace trades. Also, 1756 marks the year in which an act of Parliament formally established Borough Market as a market in its present location. Establishing such a timeline for Borough Market, however, is problematic. With respect its built environment, only its street layout existed in 1756. A reference from the early nineteenth century (c. 1820) to Borough Market’s buildings comes from a letter to the Board of Trustees

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requisitioning funds to update the old market hall to accommodate increased usage.1 Another document from the Board of Trustees verifies the commissioning of the market hall as it stands today dating from the late nineteenth century (1898) to make it more fit for purpose. Grounding Borough Market’s histories and heritage into the materiality of its built environment, it is this building that was refurbished in the late twentieth century, and stands today as an interpretation of the marketplace’s architectural past. This origin story of the marketplace’s is told and retold to customers through marketing materials, particularly its website, through signage, and, importantly, through ‘market speak,2’ a shared language comprised of rumours and discourse generation that occurs continuously between vendors, manages and regular customers. Such an aesthetic regime (Ranciere 2004) enables these stories to fall into the realm of general knowledge and mythologize the marketplace—in essence making it ‘historically old’ and thus significant. By positioning the marketplace into London’s near but increasingly distant past, this aesthetic regime also lends the marketplace political and social currency that legitimates Borough Market’s role within food provision and foodie culture—enabling it to dictate custom and establishing standards of quality and acceptability for food (Cook and Harrison 2007; Cook 2004) in the Borough of Southwark, the city of London and beyond (Dikec 2015). More broadly, it uncritically posits not only the marketplace into the realm of urban economic tradition, but the ideas of marketplace and market economy, reinforcing an economic system predicated upon fashioning and deriving value from the movement and circulation of commodities. Excavating these discourses, and signalling the ways they become normalized uncovers more than how histories are manipulated to serve economic ends. Rather, and pursuant to the aims of this chapter, it illustrates the already-­ shifting semiotic ground on which Borough Market’s commodity market is founded.

1  This document was alluded to in Borough Market’s Board Meeting minutes, and the debate over replacing the old market hall ensued, circa 1820. 2  One of challenges of using ‘ethnographic’ methods is recognizing ‘market-speak’ as part of Borough Market’s discursive system. Though certainly not a ‘material semiotic’, ‘marketspeak’ contributes to how materials in the market can be interpreted.

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Iron and Glass Borough Market’s architecture, the 1898 iron and glass arcade and the 2004 redesigned Floral Hall reinforces the slippery history associated with its origins (Fig. 3.2). Sandwiched in between the dripping brickwork of railway arches, the main arcade is comprised of green-painted iron pillars that support an iron superstructure that ultimately supports vaulted glass panels. Each iron part is painted green with white accents, and the overall effect is an open galleried hall. Given the market’s 1000-year history (260 years on this site), this arcade is a relatively new addition to the market. As mentioned above, it was completed in 1898 as part of a major rebuilding project to repair the marketplace after years of damage done by the passing railway. The former structure was capped by what the London Times described as a ‘remarkable dome’ measuring ‘84 feet in diameter and lifted 75 feet off the ground’ (Times 1893). This dome was replaced by the present-day arcade because ‘constant vibrations’ and ‘sulphurous fumes’ from coal-burning locomotives corroded the copper dome, cracked

Fig. 3.2  Iron and glass

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the superstructure and fouled the glass. The new design was cleanable, able to withstand the continuous rail traffic and, importantly for what at the time was primarily a fruit and vegetable market, oriented to receive winter sunlight whilst blocking intense summer sun that was said to ‘pour through the glass and spoil the fruit’. That the 1898 refurbishment utilized an iron-and-glass arcade in itself is not remarkable. This building technology was popularized at least 50 years earlier with buildings such as Paris’ Jardin d’Hiver, built in 1848 or London’s Crystal Palace, completed in 1851 and site of the 1851 Great Exhibition. By 1898, this type of construction for a market was typical, if not common (Kohlmaier and von Sartory 1986 (1979)). Kohlmaier and von Sartory (1986:16) note that there are numerous aesthetic reasons for these building types, but it was ‘the state of industry in the 1850s made it possible to mass-produce the glass and iron components for these buildings at a low price’. The architectural form for Borough Market, at least in 1898, was a low-cost, pragmatic and modern solution for what could be argued was a problem of modernity. From a semiotic perspective, however, Borough Market’s otherwise unremarkable iron-and-glass structure carries symbolic implications, especially reimagined as part of the late twentieth-century refurbishment. The nineteenth-century glasshouse, exemplified by the Crystal Palace, and from which Borough Market’s arcade is modelled, contrasted directly with the Victorian imagination of Dickensian  London, providing refuge for burgeoning middle and upper classes from an urban London perceived to be teeming with vermin (Kohlmaier and von Sartory 1986: 12). Further, though glasshouses in general were constructed to showcase exotic flora, the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition showcased the produce from the far reaches of the British Empire (Auerbach and Hoffenberg 2008). Its mode of display, coupled accessibility for the general public represent an early example of consumption as leisure, where consumption extends beyond simply buying commodities as necessities or luxuries and to the experience of being in and part of place. Such a model for capitalism and consumption eventually led to enclosed shopping arcades, which ultimately became the subject of Walter Benjamin’s well-known cultural critiques of consumerism within capitalism (see Benjamin and Tiedemann 1999). As a descendant of these glass houses, and a century and a half later, Borough Market’s arcades likewise provide an opportunity for consumption-­based leisure. The marketplace’s location, under the arches

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and hidden away from the high street affords consumers a sense of refuge. This time, however, the arcade provides a distraction from the mundanity of food shopping in more conventional sites, such as supermarkets. It facilitates a consumption experience, in which consumers consume more than foodstuffs, something that will be revisited later in this book (see Chap. 5). Though utilitarian when built, the cathedral ceilings of the arcade itself now point towards other, temporally distant places where consumption and leisure are more closely coupled. Floral Hall Rather than merely gesturing to these places and times, and practices, however, Borough Market encodes them directly into its built environment. A central feature of the refurbishment of Floral Hall is a set of porticos and a rosette window installed and completed in 2004. Floral Hall was originally commissioned by Frederick Gye in 1855 (four years after the Great Exhibition of 1851). Gye’s vision was a glass-covered promenade with arches and rotundas linking public buildings and extending into large galleries and halls…[where] to be assembled [were] reading rooms, exhibition halls,…and a flower market. (Kohlmaier and von Sartory 1986 (1979): 18)

Gye was the director of the Royal Italian Opera, located in London’s Covent Garden, at the time another marketplace for fruit, vegetables and flowers. He commissioned the components that became Floral Hall to be built into what is currently Covent Garden—another centre of tourism, or indeed leisure consumption for contemporary London. The market, now called ‘New Covent Garden’, moved to Nine-Elms, South West London, in the early 1970s. The porticos and rosette window were only moved to Borough Market during its refurbishment in the early 2000s after being located in the Royal Opera’s prop stores (left there after fire in Covent Garden in the 1950s) and purchased for a token cost of £1. It now occupies a prominent position in Borough Market, and in Roast Restaurant, a restaurant that bills itself as ‘Deliciously British). The chief architect of the project, Ken Greig, of Greig and Stevenson, comments:

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The abandoned Portico from Covent Garden’s Floral Hall would be the perfect addition  – to form the entrance to a new Floral Hall at Borough Market. How could anyone possibly refuse such a fortuitous match  – it would be amongst historic buildings of the same period and yet again put to market use. And so famously the Trustees were able to purchase the portico for a nominal £1.

He goes on to write: This is not just a case of moving a building and converting it to a commercial use. At Borough, the Floral Hall will be serving the use for which it was originally intended – as the home and heart of a thriving market – including a flower stall [Covent Garden was one of London’s main flower markets]. This time, the aim is to make the Floral Hall a commercial as well as an architectural success.

Replacing an ‘unremarkable 1950’s building’, refurbishment, and movement of Floral Hall was part of a £2 million lottery grant aimed at reconstructing part of London’s heritage in ‘a regeneration scheme to transform London’s oldest market into a thriving area with a reputation for food specialities and organically-grown produce  – to become known as “London’s Larder”’ (Dean et al. 2004). Borough Market’s architectural restyling is indicative of the ways in which the marketplace appropriates multiple, temporally and geographically disparate histories and packages them as its heritage. Inscribed into its built environment this heritage uncritically reimagines consumerist orientated Victorian class aspirations to inform a modern-day consumer culture in which Borough Market is consumed along with and alongside the market’s commodities (see also: Goss 1999; McMorran 2008). Along with providing the physical space for the marketplace, the built environment becomes the discursive space that enables meanings to circulate and slip, allowing the material-semiotic that reproduces the market to emerge.

Market Things and What They Say Such meanings are generated from the marketplace’s material culture (Fig. 3.3). Vendors construct stall displays from a range of objects associated physically and discursively with the commodities they sell. As with Borough Market’s built environment, these displays position commodities

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Fig. 3.3  Material culture of a material culture

within an imagined geographical narrative that draw from notions history and geography, especially about their production, and use them to construct a sense of heritage and tradition about their consumption. Playing off anxieties related to notions of ‘place-less’ food (see Ilbery and Kneafsey 2000), these displays place commodities within a within recognizable geographical tropes comprised of identifiable people and places, whilst at the same time fashioning affective consumption space that not only looks, but also feels in keeping with both with the commodities and the space of the market. Objects that make repeated appearances in the marketplace are old wooden wheel barrows. Once used by ‘barrow boys’—market porters— wheel barrows were used to shuttle goods from vendors to customers. Nearly all of the old-time wholesale vendors whose names now adorn signage around the marketplace in a further nod to its history as a wholesale fruit and vegetable market, as well as at least one former chair of the Board of Trustees, got their starts in the market as porters. No longer necessary

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for the market’s present economic configuration—and unlikely to return— within the marketplace, barrow’ and ‘boy’ are reproduced through its lore. Famously, up until recent times, the two were conjoined in a foot race from Brighton to London, celebrating the history/heritage of the market, and the physical prowess of the individual market porters. At the same time, such a feat helped to establish market porters and their wheelbarrows as part of the iconography of Borough Market, which in turn draws from and contributes to that of other markets and a wider market imaginary. The commemoration of these footraces reproduce the marketplace as a place of memory and myth attributable within the context of the recent past. These days, their utility extends only so far to act as display tables, primarily, but not exclusively, for fruit and vegetable vendors. Becoming a prop, the ‘barrow and ‘barrow boy is removed to the language of image (Mitchell 1980), evoked through old photographs, (re) articulated and imagined through ‘market speak,’ and ultimately signposted (literally) to nearby pubs as the ‘The Market Porter’ and the ‘Barrow Boy and Banker’. These wheelbarrows, however, represent an ambiguously defined, yet idealized, notion of tradition. Their presence throughout Borough Market provides a direct connection between the present-day fine-foods market and its recent, but increasingly distant, past as a wholesale marketplace for fruits and vegetables. Their physical form, as a display object with wonky wheels and peeling paint, symbolizes past market practices and generates a kind of marketplace imaginary, that, along with the surrounding built environment places Borough Market firmly within a history and tradition of market trading in London. This sense of time and place lends the marketplace a feeling of authority and authenticity, whilst at the same distances and differentiates it from either phony simulations inspired by the ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999) or from mediocrity associated with supermarket food provision. Curiously, however, this transforms Borough Market into a simulation of itself, or at least its past self, where its authenticity as a marketplace is legitimated by a material culture that provides direct physical connections to a time when Borough Market was a major distribution hub for food provision within the city. Commenting on the  slippage between authenticity, simulation and counterfeit, Grayson (2004: 302) comments:

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when consumers believe they are in the presence of something authentic, they can feel transported to the context to which the object of location is authentically linked, and thus they feel more connected with the context.

For Borough Market, ‘transportation’ happens within and because of a thriving commodities market, albeit not the one that its material culture might signal. Becoming a sign vehicle, the wheelbarrows circulate within these contexts, showing up in Borough Market through distortions in Borough Market space (though, ironically without ever leaving the physical site of Borough Market). Representing a market imaginary, the wheelbarrow serves as iconic symbol that reinforces vague and ever-shifting meanings already present within the marketplace, and mobilizing connections between different market imaginaries and simulations that circulate with the present commodity market. The wheelbarrow’s dilapidated state demonstrates that the wheelbarrow is indeed old and that it belongs in the market, but also that the marketplace is old and belongs in place. Its indexicality references the market’s past as a wholesale market relates it to the present by serving as a symbol of the former’s decline. These indexical aspects fashion nostalgia in which ‘any configuration of signs will be more subject to direct transformation in response to material circumstances’ (Keane 2003: 422). Manifesting itself through such souvenirs, material culture speaks to the ‘capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience …through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia’ (Stewart 1984: 135) (Fig. 3.4). As it becomes a symbol, this once-was object in Borough Market transforms it from ‘a souvenir of the real experience of a past or distant reality…[to] a memento of the retail experience in which its possibility is imagined’ (Goss 1999: 70). Its utilitarian ‘reinvention’ (as an object of display), however, references the shared histories of the marketplace so that even though the function of the wheelbarrow has changed, it maintains the discursive continuity of the market. That the wheelbarrow remains in the marketplace and is utilized, albeit not entirely for its original purpose, not only superimposes past and present (Law 2011), but blurs the demarcation between the spaces of the present marketplace and the past ‘market imaginary’—making them porous and leaky. The marketplace’s material-semiotic emerges from this notion of porous space. As David Lowenthal (1975: 26) comments, ‘an element of

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Fig. 3.4  The Borough Market ‘barrow’

mystery and uncertainty distinguishes past from present. We expect the past not to be precise or specific but rather to be vague and incomplete, waiting to be filled in by our own imaginations’ (Lowenthal 1975: 26). In the case of Borough Market, this system of meanings begins with uncertainties and imaginations that first connect past and present, which enter into the commoditized, symbolic economy of the market. The presence of wheelbarrows throughout the marketplace connects their role in Borough Market’s own past with its present, providing semiotic continuity for the market as it changes over time. Wheelbarrows, however, are remembered not simply as objects, but rather for their use alongside barrow boys— commemorated through photographs and market lore. Thus, across the Borough Market, wheelbarrows become markers of tradition that bring together social and material relations of the past market and deposit them into the present-day marketplace. As a result, past and present merge through the image of the ‘barrow boy’ and the physical representation of ‘wheelbarrow’.

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Bakers Individual stalls likewise deploy assemblies of objects that connect their presence in the present-day marketplace to some imagined past and tradition. One bakery, called Flour Power, established itself early on in Borough Market. Though no longer trading in the marketplace—having moved on to focus its business on wholesale production for the catering industry, before being sold to nationally known bakery and retail chain—Flour Power was the pre-eminent bakery in the marketplace. More importantly, its stall was and remains indicative of how bread and other baked goods are retailed in the marketplace, and of how vendors design their stalls to generate and mobilize particular meanings about foodstuffs, which then combine with the built environment to generate and reproduce the marketplace’s material-semiotic. The central feature of Flour Power’s stall was a demonstration bakery constructed from reclaimed bricks that, as its marketing manager explains, ‘matches the old bricks from across the road’. The bakery features glass windows along its side so that all operations of bread making can be viewed. A wide, open countertop provides work surfaces, a rack of ovens comprises the back wall, and mixers and other equipment are visible on shelves. Although bread was  only ever  made here for instructional purposes—hence demonstration bakery—the stall is imagined as a working commercial bakery, looking and feeling authentic, albeit on a smaller scale. Bread and other baked goods are stacked in wicker baskets and sold from a table located in front of the countertop work surface, and chalkboards, an extremely common feature around Borough Market, provide the signage for the days’ offerings. The baked goods for sale in the marketplace, however, are produced off-site in a commercial food production facility located in a light industrial estate in Lewisham. The interior of this  building is a non-descript office with desks, filing cabinets, linoleum floors and florescent lights, and bakery separated by steel doors. The place looks like and can be any other office attached to any other light industrial/manufacturing facility. Besides a sign that reads ‘artisan bread…with flour, water, salt, yeast…nothing else’, a mantra repeated by the owner and head baker when I speak to him later, the only other way to tell that I was even in a place of food production was that I had to fill out a form for the health department stating that I neither had a communicable disease, nor had been on a farm.

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Before entering the bakery, I donned protective clothing—white jackets and hair nets—and carefully washed my hands. The bakery is a big room with big, commercial ovens, steel work surfaces, storage areas for 50 kg sacks of flour and other ingredients. It is accessed through a steel door and is separated from the ancillary rooms by interlocking plastic strips used commonly used as barrier. It is also very clean (flour notwithstanding), and workers, dressed like us, handle finished goods with latex gloves. Finished products are stored in stackable plastic crates that are easy to store and transport. This place is the site of production for all of Flour Power’s baked goods. Baked here in Lewisham, they are transported each morning to Borough Market inside their plastic crates on a van. Once reaching the marketplace, they are unloaded and laid out for retail in wicker baskets in front of the Flour Power’s stylized brickwork stall. In commercial food production, there are strict controls on what enters. The purpose for these controls is twofold. The first is to maintain hygiene, which is critical for public health, and the prevention of disease. The second is for the business to maintain quality over its products. The owner and director tells me that ‘baking is science. It is about measurement and control…there is little room for experimentation and [with profit margins] even less for mistakes’. This system of control is maintained throughout the production process, starting with access to the facility itself. All personnel and visitors are vetted by the health department form. Anyone who is ill or been somewhere ‘unclean’ is denied. Final access to the actual food production area is governed by a barrier partition made from interlocking plastic slats. This barrier effectively separates the inside, bakery environment, from the outside, producing a geography of acceptability that contributes to a geography of quality. Once inside the bakery, protective clothing is required; jackets, hats and, importantly, gloves maintain distance between bodies and objects. The food itself is handled by clean hands and is placed in clean (plastic) containers for transport. The entire production process is a strict, almost sterile, orchestration of materiality and practice in order to maximize quality and safety—both of which lead to maximum profitability. Flour Power’s retail stall is constructed in contrast with its production facility built on systems of control, separation and governance. Here, the focus of the bakery is access. It is open to the air, and, importantly, it is open to people to watch, if not participate, in the bread-baking process. Upon arrival to Borough Market from the bakery in Lewisham, all bread is taken out of their plastic storage and transportation crates, stacked in

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wicker baskets and placed on folding tables. Chalkboard signs are written by hand describing what kinds of bread are available, their ingredients and (importantly) their price. Items are crossed off the board when they are sold out. The whole stall is constructed so that it appears as if bread is taken directly from the ovens in the back and placed fresh in the front for sale—as if the baker was on site baking bread like how it may have once happened. The juxtaposition of production with retail sites illustrates semiotic processes that displace the bakery’s commodity chain with an idealized approximation of it. Signage, old bricks, wicker baskets and, importantly, proximity to a ‘bakery’ generate a narrative that replaces the entire process of bread making with imagined representations of processes that no longer occur. In this case, bread is removed from the material practices of its production and placed into a narrative that packages it into a discourse of imagined tradition and heritage. Ironically, the chief difference between the ‘artisan breads’ sold by Flour Power (and other like bakers and bakeries) and those typically sold by supermarkets is that ‘artisan baking’ (as signalled by Flour Power’s chief baker) refers to the practices that produce a product rather than the product itself. In Flour Power’s case, these refer back to the signage, and oft-repeated refrain, at their Lewisham bakery: ‘artisan bread…with flour, water, salt, yeast…nothing else’. Flour Power’s stall at the marketplace reinforces this mantra with a historicized material representation of similar practices, even though very little baking in practice is done on the site. The result is that the material spaces of artisan bread, along with its material, social and discursive practices, are annihilated, only to be replaced by a semiotic space of artisan imaginary. Butchers The reasons for developing such complex semiotics in the marketplace ultimately come down to its need to differentiate itself from more mainstream food provision. To maintain its economy of quality and distinction, nearly all vendors express a desire to keep Borough Market visually ‘fresh’, that is to say not let it look and feel sterile, particularly compared to supermarkets. The resulting visual material culture of display is comprised of mixture of images and objects associated with production, old tools and equipment—such as fishing nets, wooden fruit crates, wine barrels or wheelbarrows and reclaimed building materials—old timber planks, reclaimed bricks and so on. In the confined space of the market hall, the

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individual meanings associated with these objects blend together to produce a material-semiotic that mobilizes imaginations of history and geography that juxtapose its sense of place with an ambiguous sense of placeless-ness. Underlying the contrast between placed and placeless food, however, are direct experiences, and associated anxieties (see Jackson 2010), amongst a number of early vendors with food crises, such as salmonella in eggs, campylobacter in chickens, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), that did nearly irreparable damage to UK agriculture only a few years before Borough Market’s refurbishment (Law 2007; Stassart and Whatmore 2003). With food scares focused on meat fresh in the memories of consumers, it is little wonder that butchers who could demonstrate quality and safety by sourcing meat directly from particular farms in particular regions were some of Borough Market’s most successful early vendors. One vendor, Andrew, is a butcher, farmer and figurehead for a cooperative group of sheep and cattle farmers from the Lake District in Cumbria. The co-op he represents produces specialized breeds of mountain sheep and cattle, Herdwick and Galloway respectively, which are retailed across the UK. The face and name behind the co-op, Andrew, comments: [I]t [food scares and industrialized farming] made people perceive Cumbria as producing meat and animals and good clean wholesome food….I don’t know how that works, but it did. We [Cumbrian Farmers] had BSE [and] FMD. We had people [farmers] scared…we had all those different issues in food…and the public was starting to say “we don’t trust.” …then we had people [asking] “where’d these sheep come from?” And, we’d say “well, they come from Langdale and [name] the farm, [name] the person,” [and] they had connection.

Andrew equates quality food in the marketplace with notions of connection between consumers and producers, along with meanings—however vague—associated with particular places and modes of production. Poor-­ quality food, however, along with sites and practices of its production, remains ambiguous. Sage (2003) relates such qualities to ‘good food’ produced through what he terms ‘relations of regard’—in which social, ecological and humane relations are embedded into food production—and ‘bad’ foods in which the profit motives of commodities and capitalism are production’s driving motivations.

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Though implied by narratives of place, vendors in marketplace rely on the interplay between specificity and ambiguity. Simply put, it does not matter where or how a particular product or foodstuff is produced, so long as it is produced somewhere identifiable through identifiable processes and suitable images of history and geography can be deployed to reinforce the discourse. The co-op Andrew represents provides customers short biographies of its products that complement Borough Market more dominant discourses about history, tradition and geography. Representing ‘rare breeds’ the sheep and cattle raised and sold by the co-op have their origins in Nordic flocks and herds, but have been part of the Cumbrian landscape for nearly 1000  years. According to Andrew, these breeds were dying out to livestock more suitable to intensive production methods. He comments that of 25 million sheep in the UK, only 60,000 of them are ‘Herdwick’ sheep, but these are making a substantial comeback as fears and anxieties over such industrialized agriculture continue to materialize. In this example, as well as across the marketplace, ‘industrial agriculture’ (of which supermarkets are part) comprises a ‘folk devil’ (Cohen 2002). One reason for this is that food production typically takes place out of view from consumers (Abbots and Coles 2013). Labelling production places and processes, and even breeds and histories of animals, seemingly brings production back into their gaze, allowing consumers to verify for themselves that the foods they eat do indeed come from safe place—even if such places only exist within their imaginations. Andrew’s stall and food preparation areas are designed to be clean and conform to UK and EU regulations regarding the transportation, storage, display and sale of meat, ever stricter in the wake of BSE and FMD crises. Surfaces are glass and steel, for easy cleaning; tools—particularly knives are colour-coded to prevent cross-contamination, and cold stores are located in close proximity to displays cases. The latter contains larger, ‘primal’ portions of meat, which are removed from the refrigerators by the on-site butchers to cut into more consumer-friendly portions. A large sign depicting Andrew’s face advertises the co-op, Cumbria and the Lake District, and the breeds of cattle and sheep on offer. Marketing pamphlets that provide information about these breeds and the landscapes on which they are raised are located next to the till. Importantly, all the materials and processes associated with vending meat, from the knives and other tools, the cold store, to the physical cutting of meat and clean-up, are clearly visible. Consumers are invited to

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watch closely, select particular cuts and otherwise participate as much as possible. Oftentimes Andrew himself, dressed in a tweed waistcoat and flat cap and playing the Cumbrian Hill Farmer, does the consumer-facing work, carrying meat from the cold store, cutting and cleaning, and interacting with customers. When he’s not around, his visage offers a reassuring gaze. Andrew’s sign economy blends discourse and practice to (re)assure prospective consumers of the quality and safety of his products. Material practices, such as food handling, cleaning and stall design conform to health regulations, but they also comprise semiotic performances that emphasize hygiene and safety by maintaining senses of visibility and connectivity between consumers and producers. The former takes place directly in the marketplace as consumers are invited to oversee the final preparation and production of their foodstuffs. The latter is generated in the marketplace by Andrew’s presence working the stall, but also through geographical imagery in which idealized landscapes of production, in this case the Cumbrian landscape, are collapsed into figures that embody notions of trust, tradition, authenticity and, ultimately, quality itself. These figures and the relations of regard they signify are in turn embedded into the commodity and ultimately consumed.

Materials and Meanings: Assembling the Market of Signs Each of the examples presented in this chapter is indicative of the types of meaning-laden material culture that comes together in Borough Market to fashion its material-semiotic (Fig. 3.5). Each individual set of meanings is directly relevant and valid for the specific object or commodity with which they are associated. Exploring them individually through the lenses of images, discourses and imagination reveals the ways in which meanings associated with place, history and geography are worked into reconfigured commodity fetishes or, indeed, double-fetishes. For instance, the presence of the wheelbarrow illustrates the market’s sense of history and heritage where human agency and objects assemble together to construct an imagination of the traditional marketplace and market trading. Different market functions, such as the negotiation and exchange of value(s), are folded into this imaginary. Borough Market is becoming an archetype for marketplace traditions, which in turn legitimates its position as a commodity

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Fig. 3.5  Assembling ‘good food’

market. The demonstration bakery, which looks and feels somehow traditional, complements this imagination of market practice. Its construction materially and discursively reimagines artisan bread and baking, and fashions an image of how bakeries and baking might/ought to have looked. At the same time, while performing the appearance of an artisan bakery, however, the bakery systematically obscures the material practices of baking that produces itself as an (artisan) bakery in the first place—fetishizing

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the imagination of artisan by obfuscating its practices. The image of Andrew, the farmer and butcher from Cumbria, furthers this sense of discursive and material disconnect. It illustrates the ways in which material practices, in this case of both farming and butchering, shift through their practice and execution into a semiotic performance of idealized ‘good food’ landscapes. These, in turn, are (re)embodied in the marketplace and subsequently commodified by the market. Borough Market, however, is chaotic and confined. Multiple stall displays that each generates with its own sets of meanings are positioned in close spatial proximity with each other. It is unavoidable that the meanings embedded in their reclaimed bricks, wicker baskets, handwritten signs, wheelbarrows and other pieces of material culture brush up against each other, coalescing into a market-wide material culture. Individual meanings that largely signal alternative modes of food provision (whether acknowledged or not) become confused within the visual frame and begin to slip. Regardless of where individual commodities come from, and regardless of the meanings that come with them, within the leaky semiotic space of the marketplace their meanings are shared. Blending together, material culture and meanings are ultimately transformed into a material-semiotic that references more generalized practices and meanings associated with the consumption of alternative food networks and initiatives. This happens materially as individual stallholders’ material practices and connections to places of production combine with consumers’ demand for such practices and connections to generate a market for foodstuffs that fall outside of more mainstream food provision—for example, a de facto alternative food market (see: Guthman 2002; Hinrichs 2003; Kirwan 2004). Critically, however, this is as much a semiotic process as it is material. Meanings and practices associated with alternative food, however contested by individuals in the marketplace, are repeatedly performed and reproduced by vendors acting individually but who come together in the marketplace to act in concert with each other. As important as individual commodities with individual meanings are to the market, they matter insofar as they contribute to its collective material and semiotic reproduction of the marketplace—meaning that performances of commodities ‘make’ the market (Zaloom 2006) as much as their physical materiality. Indeed, all stallholders in Borough Market mobilize material culture to generate some form of nostalgia and tradition that references, albeit

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uncritically, an imagined place and time of food. Objects like old bricks, wheelbarrows, fishing tackle, wooden crates or wine barrels combine with vendors and commodities to generate a bucolic foodscape comprised of artisans and yeoman farmers, as well as a sense of place in the marketplace. This sense is reinforced by a built environment that appropriates Victorian iconography to reimagine Borough Market’s history as a heritage of conspicuous consumption. Goss (1993, 1999) and Gottdiener (1982), for instance, both note the ways in which such semiotic ‘theming’ (Gottdiener uses the phrase ‘social semiotics’) works to displace the consumer gaze away from the present and into the realms of spatial-temporal fantasy. Offering ‘stable identities and a sense of public purpose’, Goss (1999: 68) writes, such ‘fantasy lands’ employ material elements to construct a built environment that corresponds and satisfies consumer perceptions and desires. Similarly themed, Borough Market’s material-semiotic draws from both imagined landscapes of commodity production that utilize visual and textual representations of quality food, and an imagined market-scape of consumption fashioned from representations of markets and market trading in London as well as images of nineteenth-century consumer culture. The semiotic space where imaginations of production are folded together with images of consumption result in further slippages in meaning where imaginations of place (or imagined senses of place) disassociate from commodities to construct and sustain ‘place myths,’ (Hopkins 1998: 65) which are then repackaged by the market’s material-semiotics and sold off in the form of foodstuffs that bundle together material practices with meanings about consumption. Underneath this confused and slippery economy of meanings, however, a different story appears. The discursive elements that produce Borough Market each comes from somewhere, a metabolic relationship with (N)ature. In the marketplace, this is refashioned through material practice and semiotic representation that allude to imagined places and processes, transforming object and commodities into symbols for what producers and consumers suggest they ought to be. Thus, without identifying it specifically, Borough Market’s material-semiotic juxtaposes the marketplace with a food landscape dominated by an imagined sense of what food ought not to, contrasting its sense of place with an ambiguous sense of placeless-ness—albeit one that tacitly references an industrial foodscape comprised of factories and supermarkets. This posits Borough

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Market’s economy of signs as a part of a moral economy of how consumers should and should not consume, and how producers should and should not produce. Borough Market emerges as a marketplace that ultimately capitalizes on its own self-generated critique of contemporary food provision by positioning itself as the anathema to the agri-capitalism that engenders it.

Conclusions Engaging with the material-semiotic practices that produce Borough Market space, this chapter argues that the different meanings embedded within individual pieces of visual material culture combine into a general system of meanings for the marketplace. Despite individual meanings leading to a geography of commodities that is extant to the marketplace, the system for the marketplace is internal and referent to itself. Thus, it no longer matters whether the material geographies of commodities, those which ostensibly become a commodity’s use and exchange values, match those of their commodification, so long as they are present in the marketplace and subject to its system of meanings. What does matter, however, is that the material culture that brackets the commodity exchange works to maintain the imagery and imaginary of the marketplace. This means that Borough Market is ultimately a market in which meanings and signs detach from objects, and are subsequently reproduced and traded on the market floor. The object becomes an incidental avatar for exchange, whilst the economy of the marketplace is reproduced through the exchange of signs. By appropriating elements of history, the market is able to produce its own heritage. The side effect of this spatial and discursive distortion, however, is that the semiotic structure of the market’s built environment becomes unstable as meanings begin to blend into other meanings (Lees 2002). The result of these unstable meanings and folding geographies is that meaning within Borough Market predicate further instability within the market’s material-semiotics. The presence of wheel barrow adds a temporal trope to the geographic; the bread bakers’ stall slips the material out of Borough Market and places it firmly into a market imaginary, and the leaky spaces produced by these processes subsume even the embodiment of actual farmers in whom material practice becomes embedded into the semiotic. This material-semiotic, however, adds another dimension to the marketplace. As signs and values detach from commodities to produce in

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Borough Market a self-referential system of meanings that focuses on consumption, Borough Market itself becomes a marketplace in which experiences become the objects of exchange and consumption. Explored further in Chap. 5, the blending and confusion of meanings leads to a sense of glamour, allure and, ultimately, a sense of buzz within Borough Market. ‘[A]rising out of an environment which mixes human and nonhuman so as to produce captivation’ (Thrift 2008a, b: 14), this sense of buzz works to fuel the reproduction of the various political and cultural economies of market. Borough Market’s material-semiotic ultimately captivates consumers through the displacement and enactment of meanings and the enchantment of its consumption spaces. As a result, the marketplace’s ever-shifting material-semiotics produces in Borough Market a marketplace imaginary, where anything can happen.

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Kirwan, J. (2004). Alternative strategies in the UK agro-food system: Interrogating the alterity of farmers’ markets. Sociologia Ruralis, 44(4), 21. Kohlmaier, G., & von Sartory, B. (1986). Houses of glass: A nineteenth-century building type (J. C. Harvey, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Law, J. (2007). Actor network theory and material semiotics. Version of 25th of April 2007. Retrieved from http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law-­ ANTandMaterialSemiotics.pdf Law, L. (2011). The ghosts of White Australia: Excavating the past (s) of Rusty’s market in tropical cairns. Continuum, 25(5), 669–681. Law, J., & Hassard, J. (1999). Actor network theory and after. Oxford: Blackwell. Lees, L. (2002). Rematerializing geography: The ‘new’ urban geography. Progress in Human Geography, 26(1), 101–112. Lowenthal, D. (1975). Past time, present place: Landscape and memory. Geographical Review, 65(1), 1–36. MacCannell, D. (1976). The tourist: A new theory of the leisure class. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Marsden, T. K. (2004). Theorising food quality: Some key issues in understanding its competitive production and regulation. In M.  Harvey, A.  McMeekin, & A.  Warde (Eds.), Qualities of food (pp.  129–155). Manchester: Manchester University Press. McInerney, Jay (2002). “The Production of Food: From Quantity to Quality.” Preecedings of the Nutrition Society 61: 7. McMorran, C. (2008). “Understanding the ‘heritage’in heritage tourism: Ideological tool or economic tool for a Japanese hot springs resort?.” Tourism Geographies 10.3 (2008): 334–354. Mintz, S. (1996). Tasting food, tasting freedom: Excursions into eating, culture, and the past. Boston: Beacon Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1980) Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory. Critical Inquiry 6 (3):539–567 Pine, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (1999). The experience economy: Work is theatre and every business a stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Ranciere, J. (2004). The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible (G. Rockhill, Trans.). London: Continuum. Riggins, S. (1994). The socialness of things: essays on the socio-semiotics of objects. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Sage, C. (2003). Social embeddedness and relations of regard: alternative ‘good food’networks in south-west Ireland. Journal of Rural Studies 19, 47–60.

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Stassart, P. and Whatmore, S.J. (2003). Metabolising risk: food scares and the un/ re-making of Belgian beef. Environment and Planning A 35, 449–62. Stewart, S. (1984). On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. London, The Johns Hopkins University Press. Thrift, N. (2008a). Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. London: Routledge. Thrift, N. (2008b). The material practices of glamour. The Journal of Cultural Economy, 1(1), 9–23. Trubek, A.  S. (2005). Place matters. In C.  Korsmeyer (Ed.), The taste culture reader: Experiencing food and drink (pp. 260–271). New York: Berg. Zaloom, C. (2006). Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 4

From Tree to Cup: Coffee and Commodity Culture in Borough Market

Abstract  At their heart, markets and marketplaces are about the negotiation, valuation and exchange of things—commodities. Generating the space of the market—a market-space (Bestor 2004)—these things have geographies that extend the marketplace to a constellation of other places associated with their production. Yet in Borough Market, these geographies only become important when they are reproduced and performed vis-à-vis their discursive production and consumption in the marketplace. Adopting a ‘following’ approach (Marcus 1996), this chapter follows the thing(s) (Cook, Antipode 36 (4): 21, 2004), as well as the place(s) and geography(ies) (Coles 2013, Consuming coffees and producing places: From the intimate to the global–and everywhere in between. Why we eat how we eat. London: Ashgate, 2013), of objects that become commodities in the marketplace. Specifically, it follows coffee, a staple commodity of Borough Market from its places of origin, where specialist buyers seek out coffees of distinctive provenance, to the roasting facilities where the qualities of such provenance are physically inscribed into the materiality of the coffee, to the point of retail and consumption in the marketplace where these qualities are translated into value(s), and ultimately realized. The chapter uses this example of coffee to argue that as important as these material geographies are to value of commodities in the marketplace, they matter only insofar as they are made apparent, and thus realizable through negotiation and exchange. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Coles, Making Markets Making Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72865-6_4

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Keywords  Coffee • Commodities • Embeddedness • Materiality • Place-Making

Cups of Coffee One of Borough Market’s early retailers Monmouth Coffee Company is something of an institution on the London coffee scene. It also epitomizes Borough Market’s discourses on value and quality as they relate to place. Like any market or marketplace, Borough Market is constituted by the negotiation, valuation and exchange of things—commodities. Generating the space of the market, a market-space in Bestor’s terms (2004), these ‘things’ have geographies that extend the marketplace to a constellation of other places associated with their production. In Borough Market, these geographies only become significant when they are reproduced and performed through their discursive production and consumption in the marketplace. Adopting a ‘following’ approach (Marcus 1996), this chapter follows the thing(s) (Cook 2004), as well as the place(s) and geography(ies) (Coles 2013), of Monmouth Company’s coffee as it becomes a commodity in the marketplace: from its places of origin where specialist buyers seek out coffees of distinctive provenance, to the roasting facilities where the qualities of such provenance are physically inscribed into the materiality of the coffee, to the point of retail and consumption in the marketplace where these qualities are translated into value(s) and ultimately realized. In doing so, this example of coffee is used to argue that as important as these material geographies are to the value of commodities in the marketplace, they matter only insofar as they are made apparent and thus realizable through negotiation and exchange (Fig. 4.1). Founded in 1978 as a single-shop front in Covent Garden, London, Monmouth has grown to include three retail sites, a roasting facility and warehouse, and numerous wholesale contracts. Although Monmouth’s wholesale operations are profitable, its business is driven by its visibility as a high-quality brand in the retail sector. According to Anita Leroy, Monmouth founder and president, from its beginnings the company looked to establish itself as purveyors of high-end and specialty coffee, eventually identifying itself with ‘specialist’ coffees in opposition to all mainstream coffee. It is worth noting that there are only two species of coffee produced in the world: Coffae Canephora (C. canephora), also known as ‘Robusta’, and Coffae Arabic (C.  ArabicaI). By the early

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Fig. 4.1  Different arches, same coffee

twenty-­ first century, Arabica comprised most of what was consumed (about 65%) and was worth roughly $14 billion a year, making it the second most valuable (legal) commodity in the world after oil. The majority of Arabica coffee is traded on open commodity markets as an agricultural future under the ‘Soft-Tropicals’ listing. This is ‘commodity coffee’. A small proportion of Arabica coffee is designated as ‘specialty coffee’. Mostly the domain of specialist networks of producers, importers and retailers,1 specialty coffee commands higher prices than it would on the futures market. Specialty coffee is distinguished from commodity coffee by narratives of taste and/or the ethics of production. Although different agricultural regimes may alter the bio-chemistry of coffee at a molecular level, commodity coffee and specialty coffee are fundamentally the same— the same species of coffee that requires similar processing to produce a 1  Although it has become more widely available since supermarkets sought to diversify their markets in the late 90s (Raynolds et al. 2004; De Pelsmacker et al. 2005).

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consumable product. Arabica coffee is grown on farms and plantations in upland tropical forests or environments that were once tropical forests in the global south (Dicum and Luttinger 1999). The beans come from a dichotomous seed in a red fruit called a ‘cherry’, which is pulped to separate the fruit from the seed. The seeds are air- or machine dried to become ‘green coffee’, and the remaining fruit is either dumped or converted into fertilizer or biofuel. Green coffee is packed into 60 kg bags ready for sale and the next stage of production—the roasting and packaging of coffee for retail to end-consumers. When Monmouth started in 1978, with the exception of a handful of purveyors, coffee meant commodity coffee. As Anita Leroy commented in a personal interview in 2007: You could only buy Colombian Medellin Excelsior and Brazil Santos, occasionally a Kenyan AA if you were lucky or a Costa Rica High Grown.2 The shippers…sat at their desks in the City; they didn’t cup the coffee; they never went to origin, they didn’t need to go to…because as far as they were concerned, Colombia produced one grade of coffee, and I would say “what about regional differences?” “Oh, no regional differences.” “Small farms?” “Oh no, it’s just all one grade.” And it was easy for them, they just shifted paper around.

At this time, coffee was just another commodity, figures on paper, abstracted from the material product—its value realized through trading on the commodity markets. Any coffee that meets export grade specification is categorized as a single thing; commodity coffee is characterized by sameness (Daviron and Ponte 2005). Discursively, production processes are characterized by vertical integration and external flows of capital that are abstracted from the spaces where the materiality of the commodity is practised (Ponte 2002a). Trading floors act as sites of value production, far removed from the product itself. A world price, ostensibly linked to supply and demand and the difference between coffee’s ‘spot price’ and contract price for commodity futures, is fixed at the end of each day’s trading at the New York Stock Exchange.3 Price in commodity markets, 2  Coffee is typically referred to by actors within Monmouth by its origin. The reasons for this will emerge later in this section. 3  Coffee production is seasonal arriving on the market after the harvest. Futures contracts are dated to reflect northern and southern hemisphere harvests: May and September. As part of an interconnected market, however, commodities prices are often based on speculation

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­ owever, is not as simple as supply and demand. As Caliskan (2007: 242) h argues in reference to Turkish cotton markets at Izmir Mercantile Exchange, price is a product of negotiation where buyers bid against each other to secure the best deal to facilitate commodity mobility or ‘liquidity’. Commodity mobility becomes the source of value within a commodity chain that only casually intersects with the commodity itself (Donnet et al. 2007: 2). For commodity coffee, the physical attributes of Arabica coffee are inextricably linked to commodity mobility and, therefore, value. Specifically, shelf life at different points of the production process is key: newly harvested coffee ‘cherries’ are subject to rot if not processed quickly; green coffee can be warehoused for a long time without ill-effect; roasted coffee has a shorter shelf life—just two weeks according to aficionados. At the beginning of the production process, buyers with the right supplies and access to the futures market can flood the market before harvest, drive the price down and buy from farmers who must sell or risk losing their crop. For states whose economies depend on coffee, such price manipulation can be disastrous (Vitzthum 1999); export-led economies have been marked by such boom and bust cycles tied to coffee (de Melo 2003). At the market end, sellers warehousing green coffee can withhold supplies, forcing roasters to buy at higher prices. Once coffee is roasted, it must be retailed before it becomes stale and loses value. Higher prices are passed on to retailers who either pass them onto consumer or take the loss, depending on the conditions of the retail market. Such price manipulation has led to vertical integration by firms doing business in the material side of the commodity coffee industry. Large-scale purveyors, often criticized as ‘multi-nationals’, are able to retain sufficient control over their commodity chains so as to maintain their coffee purveyance while simultaneously leveraging the commodity markets to their advantage as part of a wider diversification strategy (Daviron and Ponte 2005). This way, they can profit both from the production and sale of their own commodity coffee supplies, as well as from the dynamics of market fluctuation. Power in the commodity chain ultimately lies with those who have the capital to buy and sell as and when they wish (Fig. 4.2). Setting up her business, Anita Leroy was convinced that with the right knowledge Monmouth could bypass the commodity markets, mitigate and usually ‘tied’ to other commodities, generally oil. As one trader told me, ‘there is a market for everything somewhere; I know a guy who sold a ten year old batch and made a slight profit on it.’

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Fig. 4.2  Coffee stories from around the world

against the risk of price fluctuation and retail a quality product. Friends in the US coffee industry, which was already segmented to reflect both a commodity market and an economy of quality (see: Dicum and Luttinger 1999), confirmed her belief that higher-quality coffee was available in certain regions; the issue was how to source it: ‘I thought that… the information… was getting lost. This was before the internet, before email’ (Interview, Leroy, March 2007). A fortuitous connection with some former commodity traders who were starting their own shipping company provided the answer: They were ex-Goldman-Sachs traders specializing in Central and South America and they decided to get out of that...by developing contacts at origin. We were the first clients and we said yeah. I mean they came to us with names of farmers…and this was exactly what we were looking for. (Interview, Leroy March 2007)

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These former traders offered Monmouth specialist knowledge of and access to places of origin. Establishing its early enterprise with the assistance of such intermediaries, Monmouth positioned itself at the vanguard of an emerging consumer market for specialty coffee—a market predicated on an economy of differentiation and quality. What became Monmouth’s mark of quality was a discourse that posited Monmouth as alternative to the conventional coffee business. Underpinning this was an assertion that quality could be cultivated and controlled by establishing and maintaining close networks of production—for Anita Leroy this came from knowing individual farmers and places of production, from talking and working with them to understand and refine a product that, according to Anita, is materially different to that sold as commodity coffee: If you have a handful of beans, green coffee, and you look at specialty coffee and you look how beautiful it is, it’s bright and it’s blue-ish and it’s waxy, and you hold a handful of commodity grade coffee—the stuff that goes into all of the instants—and it’s different. You don’t recognize it; it’s the same product, but it’s massed together as one thing. (Interview, Leroy: 2007)

Broadly speaking, specialty coffee emerged as a way for farmers and producers to protect their product and income from the vagaries of the world market (Samper 2003). Discourses around quality and socio-ecological and ethical criteria of production serve to differentiate specialty coffee from its mainstream competitors, from commodity coffee.4 Value is created via narratives of quality, which are produced through the marketing of the specialty coffee network’s knowledge of and control over the production process, from farm to cup. In practice, purveyors of specialty coffee identify farms and plantations that produce coffee with desirable characteristics and support them to maximize their production. The result is a product that asserts difference from the ‘sameness’ of commodity coffee—a product whose commodification is the result of performing these claims to quality and ethical difference.5 Today, 40-plus years after their initial forays into specialty coffee, Monmouth sells what they call ‘specialist’ coffees—coffee that meets their 4  Ethical schemes and narratives include fair trade, organic, bird and rainforest friendly, shade grown and a host of others (Lingle 1996; Renard 1999). 5  Some purveyors of specialty coffee have sought further distinctions in response to the mainstreaming of ethical consumption habits. See Renard 2005) for a critique and discussion of the implications of such mainstreaming of ethics.

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own rigorous expectations for quality but do not necessarily fit standard expectations for specialty coffee. This is apparent in Monmouth’s mission statement, which asserts its vision of how the company adheres to ethical standards through its means of sourcing coffee: We travel extensively throughout the year, visiting the producers and cooperatives with whom we currently work and looking for interesting varietals of coffee and new farms from which to buy. During these visits we talk to farmers and cooperative members, learning more about the coffee they grow and process and the challenges that they face. We then look to establish a relationship with the grower and exporter of that coffee. We see this as sustainable, fair and equal trade. (‘What we do’, https://www. monmouthcoffee.co.uk/about-­us/, accessed 9 August 2020)

Monmouth coffee might be organic, fair trade, friendly to birds or the rainforest; it might come from small farms or large plantations, but none of these ‘ethical’ designations override Monmouth’s concern for taste: Some of the finest coffees we’ve been tasting come from big farms in Brazil. They know. They’re professionals; they’re getting great flavors. It’s refined. (Interview, Leroy: March 2007)

Quality, of course, is discursive. From the outset, Monmouth positioned itself at the margins of an industry, and consequently has had the power to inform the meaning of quality. While discourses around specialty coffee intimate that quality derives from nature (from the natural qualities of particular varieties and growing regions) and is maintained and assured by relationships between producers, consumers and intermediaries, this ‘nature’ is socially mediated to ensure that coffee conforms to a set of qualitative criteria determined by Monmouth’s buyers and their understandings of consumer preferences. For Monmouth, great-tasting coffee comes from developing relationships with experienced and expert ‘professionals’. These professionals understand that their relationship with companies like Monmouth, and thus profitability, is dependent on their capacity to answer their client’s needs—to produce the right kinds of high-­ quality coffee. By making their relationships with single farms, estates and coops visible to consumers (or at least aspects of them), Monmouth projects a sense of transparency that is deemed lacking from much corporate

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practice and, as such, fosters consumer trust despite the non-adherence to standard designations of fair or sustainable coffee. Monmouth’s decision to call its coffee ‘specialist’ in lieu of ‘specialty’ is an important discursive shift in this respect. For Anita, Monmouth deals exclusively with coffee at the ‘little pinnacle at the top’ of a ‘pyramid of coffee production’, above the ‘whacking great base that’s commodity coffee’ and the middling ‘fine commercial coffees that are sometimes called specialty’ (Interview: March 2007). For a business retailing at the luxury or specialist end, it is shrewd business to distinguish itself from the rest of the industry, commodity coffee, or otherwise. Linked to these discursive processes of differentiation are particular biophysical materialities that are associated with Monmouth’s version of ‘good tasting’ coffee. Good taste is mediated by networks of experts. Quality standards disseminate through a value chain but they are dictated through its governance (Ponte and Gibbon 2005) (evoking Thevenot and ‘Conventions Theory’). Governance in this case refers to the business goals of Monmouth, how they configure quality coffee and the customer experience. At all points of the commodity chain, Monmouth is positioned in the centre, mediating knowledge about coffee and, by extension, material practice.

Discovery: Placing Quality, Identifying Value Monmouth’s identification of good-quality coffee starts with the access to the farms and plantations in coffee-producing countries that was initially provided by the former Goldman Sachs traders. For Monmouth this was a phase of discovery, one that discursively is reproduced by the ethos of the company and its brand. Given the history of world coffee production as part of a political economic system where most of the world’s coffee is produced by aggregating the production of two countries, Brazil and Colombia (Topik et al. 2006), initially perceiving quality means identifying places that are capable of physically producing quality (materially through nature) and shaping them into specialist coffee-producing regions (discursively as Nature). This is a process in itself that differentiates one variety of coffee from another and literally means discovering particular parts of particular regions that produce the flavours of coffee and that lead to quality. In the process regions are converted into regional ‘flavour profiles’ and are established as a related ‘terroir’. Notably, a common trope used in the discourse of specialty coffee alongside traceability is that of terroir.

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The concept of terroir has been used effectively in discourses surrounding quality foods, particularly wine, emphasizing specificity over the homogenization associated with industrialized agricultural products (Bessiaere 1998) and reflecting a shift towards localized systems of food provision (Bohmrich 1996, see also: Berard and Marchenay 1995). These systems and discourses are not merely descriptive, they are highly politicized, manifesting as protectionist arguments for certain farmers and farms and played out through tensions within international trade (Josling 2006). Terroir is a socially constructed claim to heritage and its consumption and an assertion about the role of the rural landscape. For consumers, terroir is shorthand for authenticity of place and ‘a surrogate for quality’ (Gade 2004: 848). Drawing on Urry’s work on the production of consumable spaces through different mechanisms of social construction and place-­ myth–making (1995), it could be said that terroir commoditizes place into saleable products that are transported elsewhere for sale (see also Fitzsimmons and Goodman 1998). The production of specialty coffee relies on the premise that it is possible to identify and enhance discernable elements of quality that come ‘naturally’ to the beans. That those natures are defined socially and that coffee’s physicality is the result of agriculture, a social process is lost in translation. By promoting terroir, specialty coffee surfaces from two interrelated tropes to produce a ‘commodity space’ out of its material and discursive production processes. In this context, quality becomes associated the consumption of place, and thus with taste and tastes of nature—this is apparent in Monmouth’s narrative of its coffee, of its business. The aromas and flavours of coffee are linked to more than 800 volatile and non-volatile chemical compounds that are released during coffee’s processing and realized when it is brewed—they constitute the tastes and smells that drinkers identify as ‘coffee’. For Monmouth’s buyers, like A.J. Kinnell, quality is taste, which comes from the biophysical aspects of production: ‘good taste begins with getting the fundamentals right, the physical aspects, soil, climate, terroir’ (Interview, Kinnell: July 2008). Usually associated with wine, terroir connotes the climate and geology of agricultural production; drawing on narratives of landscape and nature, it concurrently suggests that foods with terroir taste of their place of production (Demossier 2000). Soil affects taste: ‘don’t ask me about the chemistry, but adding stuff to the soil, alters the taste. Increasing phosphoric acid will bring out the fruit’ (Interview, Kinnell: July 2008). Getting the right soil isn’t a one-size-fits-all process either; different varieties of coffee

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require different types of soil. In addition to soil, coffee producers must consider the micro-climate. Arabica coffee varietals grow best in the tropics above around 2500 ft (c. 750m) (Ukers 1922). Each variety of coffee tree requires the right combination of heat, moisture and shade to flourish; adjusting the micro-climate alters the taste of the end product. For Monmouth, quality coffee depends initially on selecting the best varieties and matching each to a favourable soil and micro-climate. Failure in any component will diminish quality, manifesting ‘in elements that you can taste’ (Interview, Kinnell: July 2008). Farmers ultimately determine how to alter variables to maximize quality and yield, albeit in dialogue with companies like Monmouth. Critical mediators for the initial prospects for quality coffee, farmers contracted to produce specialty coffee for companies like Monmouth must actively manage and respond not only to variable weather and potential climate changes, but also to the changing tastes of consumers. Taste, as A.J. admits, is ultimately subjective. Buyers like A.J. are central to establishing expected tastes and standards associated with specialty coffee, to defining the characteristics that express a coffee’s terroir. These agreements are produced socially through cupping sessions, a formalized tasting ritual where buyers gather to taste a region’s, a farm’s or sometimes a country’s coffee for evaluation. Awards are conferred according to terroir, establishing how a particular coffee, a particular place, should taste; over time, regional flavours emerge as the material-social product of cupping. These economic actors who determine the value of coffee, and whether it meets its prescribed place-based criteria, are ‘colleagues who contribute in their own right to the production of knowledge and its transcription in reality’ (Callon et  al. 2002: 195). Cuppers determine the tastes of place, and then demand that the products from these places conform to expectation. This does not necessarily mean that coffees which deviate from the expected standards of taste are excluded. Indeed, companies like Monmouth are ‘always on the lookout for new flavors and new producers’ (Interview, Kinnell: February 2007). Discussing her approach to buying, Monmouth’s buyer A.J. uses language suggestive of an indefinable and subjective response to tasting new coffees, albeit within the prescribed parameters of a variety’s taste profile: ‘when I find something that makes me go “wow!” I especially take note’. Similarly, in reference to buying from new producers, A.J. notes that Monmouth will buy at auction if she’s tasted a new coffee that she’s ‘blown away by’ (Interview, Kinnell: February 2007). Tasting for A.J. represents a social and material process. All decisions are ultimately informed by what buyers

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think their customers will like and/or try—‘knowledge’ formed through interactions with producers, buyers and the customers themselves. On the supply side (and underlying negotiations of quality and taste) are complex pricing dynamics that play out between buyers and producers, as well as between competing buyers. Companies with a strong brand and market presence like Monmouth enter price negotiations with producers from a significant position of power. Producers have little room to negotiate higher prices within the parameters of specialty coffee’s expectations of terroir—a product deemed inferior to those standards is not going to attract a higher price however skilled the producer in the art of negotiation. Instead, the buyers’ expectations inform the prices. Part of the job for a Monmouth buyer is to interact with producers in order to ‘discover’ what they are doing with their crops. While buyers may advise and support producers to develop or refine their product, they may also withdraw their association. A.J. tells me that ‘when a producer isn’t doing what we think they could be, we tell them, and usually you can immediately tell the difference. Producers are quick to change what they’re doing...though, we’ve ended contracts as well’ (Interview, Kinnell: February 2007). It is in the business interests of producers to work and identify with well-known and respected retailers like Monmouth; knowledge exchange in this loose system of patronage is vital to ensure success. As Anita Leroy noted in a discussion about the process of picking and sorting cherries, when producers see that their standards of living improve while working with them, Monmouth can support them to develop their product and concurrently protect their own business interests: When, we come along and say, you know you’re still not picking every ripe cherry, there are a lot of greens in there…which increases astringency which is felt in taste profile...they’re going to listen to us a bit more. We’re not just going to be the gringos that say better quality, lower prices, but we are going to ensure our customers have quality. (Leroy Interview: March 2007)

Producing specialist coffee is an iterative social-material process where knowledge is exchanged, but there is a still directional flow of power within the network, and material practice is controlled through observation and quality assurance (Duncan 2002). The power relations in Monmouth’s relationship to their ‘partner’ producers is asymmetrical. Prioritizing consumer demand for quality coffee may drive positive social

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and economic change for producers, but Monmouth controls the terms of any partnerships and always has the option to dissolve them. In addition to this means of sourcing coffee by contract and capacity building, Monmouth buyers also compete at auction where the dynamics of supply and demand more obviously take hold. Auctions, however, are sites where more than commodity prices are negotiated (Caliskan 2007). Subtle arrangements of power and market dominance are established at these points of exchange. Monmouth, for instance, buys some coffee at a specialty coffee auction called the Cup of Excellence, an auction where farms, co-ops and estates enter their harvests into a tasting competition. Coffee buyers representing a wide range of organizations from around the world undertake blind tastings and vote on each variety. All coffee then goes to auction, with the ‘best’ commanding the highest price. Concurrent to the competition’s concerns for taste as a purely qualitative criteria, individual buyers evaluate quality against potential retail value for their company—the ‘best’ does not always reach Monmouth’s shops if the price isn’t right. One year, A.J.  Kinnell noted, the winner in the Guatemala category was judged by all as ‘one of the best coffees…ever tasted’ and ‘ended up selling for something like $80 a pound’; for A.J., for Monmouth’s customers, it was not ‘$80 great’. and Monmouth would not be able to sell enough of it to realize the value (Interview, Kinnell: July 2008). While quality as taste may be decided through the social mechanisms of awards and auctions, its appearance as part of a commodity chain for firms like Monmouth depends on the full realization of price negotiations as profit on the shop floor. For Monmouth, the raw materials for their ‘specialist-­ coffee’ is the product of numerous agents and practices, an assemblage of biophysical and socio-discursive elements. It does not just grow; it is selected, cultivated and curated—from a region to a farm to certain trees and the individual cherries. This is the beginning of Monmouth coffee’s ‘life’ as an object. Its potential is yet to be realized; quality must be transformed into value.

Transformation: Commoditizing Quality, Expressing Value Down the road from Borough Market, under another set of railway arches, Monmouth’s roastery figures as a space of transformation in the life of its specialist coffee (Fig.  4.3). Before transformation though, comes

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Fig. 4.3  Coffee: a commodity in waiting

transportation—an in-between space in the commodity chain. As it moves from the stage of discovery to transformation, spaces of close engagement and control, Monmouth’s coffee disappears from sight. Loaded onto container ships in producing countries, the green coffee beans arrive sometime later at Monmouth’s processing facility in Bermondsey, London. The only indication of what happens to the coffee en route is when something goes awry and it is delayed or shows up damp or damaged. Once it arrives at the roastery, the coffee’s geography reappears and Monmouth reasserts its control. Coffee beans are checked closely for spoilage as they are unloaded from trucks; shipping companies compensate Monmouth for

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any product that does not meet its high standards. The green coffee beans must then be roasted, ready for grinding and brewing. This process of chemical transformation oxidizes the beans through the addition of heat and air, and concurrently releases the coffee’s potential in terms of quality as taste and quality as retail value. In tandem with the physical transformation of the beans, the knowledges and materialities of quality developed within the spaces of discovery that Monmouth claims for its specialist coffee must be converted into knowledges and materialities that reflect not only the geographies of their discovery but also Monmouth’s expert handling and processing as coffee moves from production to consumption. The exchange value of green ‘specialty’ coffee is tied to its potential use value; it will not be realized as profit until the coffee (as bean or beverage) is sold to consumers, which depends on more than its existence in a specialty or alternative commodity system. As Monmouth buyer A.J. Kinnell notes, ‘a lot can happen to these beans before they ever reach customers, and most of the things…are bad’ (Interview, Kinnell: July 2008). While talking about their work, Monmouth’s roasters reiterate the need for quality beans in the first place: ‘you can’t bring out good flavors from bad beans...hide them, perhaps, but can’t add anything that isn’t already there’ (Interview, Angela Holder, 2007). Roasting is presented as a skilled craft at Monmouth, practised by expert roasters who are taught to roast coffee to meet specific tastes determined by company/customer preferences— just as in the initial production stage, knowledge exchange is key here, as is concern for the end user. Buyers like A.J.  Kinnell work closely with Monmouth’s roasters to ensure that the end product imparts the flavour that they helped to identify and cultivate in the raw product: ‘Roasting is really cool because green coffee is valueless...Roasting brings out the flavors and turns a raw product into something else...But there are parameters...between green and burned’ (Interview, Kinnell: July 2008).6 Roasted coffee is graded according to colour; these grades—light, medium and dark—correspond to time and heat during roasting. Typical flavours are ‘fruit’, ‘citrus’, ‘chocolate’, ‘caramel’, ‘earthy’ or ‘winey’, and 6  It should be noted that the longer coffee is roasted, the less its regional variations are apparent. This is because roasting breaks down volatile chemical compounds, converting sugars into carbon. ‘Dark’ roasted coffees have had more sugar converted into carbon and essentially taste the same regardless of their origin. This is the reason behind the very dark, almost burned ‘French’, and ‘Italian’ roasts. Neither country, through their colonial enterprises, had access to high quality Arabica coffee. Instead, they made do with Robusta coffee, and dark roasting was a coping mechanism to burn away the bad taste of the beans.

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often coffee is described as ‘elegant’, ‘smooth,’ ‘clean’, ‘light’, ‘bright’ and, occasionally, ‘funky’, and it is the combination of these flavours and characteristics that lead to a particular variety’s ‘flavor profile’. Roasting at Monmouth aims to realize these profiles where quality is ultimately expressed at the direction of buyers, who, having tasted and evaluated the coffees before purchase, seek to impart their tasting experience onto customers. Success rests on the roasters correctly interpreting and implementing the directions of buyers like A.J., which depends on a shared understanding of coffee. Rather than following a set of precise instructions about temperature and time of cooking, roasters must make sense of a buyer’s request for a certain colour or shade. When asking for coffee to be roasted as a particular grade, for instance, A.J. may ask for subtle variants on the standard: ‘the medium needs to be more medium than medium…the dark, less dark than dark’ (Interview, Kinnell: July 2008). While A.J. credits Monmouth’s roasters for normally understanding her directions, she also notes that each roaster imparts something of themselves to the coffee, such that she can usually tell which of the roasters roasted a particular coffee just by taste (Fig. 4.4). While such ‘craft’ is key to Monmouth’s discourse about its ‘specialist’ coffee, it also poses risk. Initially, Monmouth roasted its coffee in the basement of the Covent Garden shop ‘using rather old-fashioned, directflame machines, first a small UNO and then a 1930s Whitmee’ (‘History’, https://www.monmouthcoffee.co.uk/about-­us/, accessed 9 August 2020). In 2007, having opened the shop in Borough, Monmouth moved its roasting facilities to Maltby Street in Bermondsey, London (and three railway arches); ten years later, they moved again, further east this time to Spa Terminus and five converted railway arches. With growth came greater automation. Direct-flame machines were replaced by larger machines that use air roasting technology for greater efficiency and consistency. In the first move, Monmouth introduced roasting machines manufactured by Petroncini, a small company in Bologna; in the second, it turned to Loring, a US company that invented the world’s first machine capable of smokeless roasting, and with it greater precision and efficiency. In the words of one of Monmouth’s roasters who had learned on the old direct-­ flame machines, the new Petroncini machines enable a ‘bunch of non-­ scientists’ to be ‘more scientific’ about their work (Interview, Holder, 2007). Greater automation allows Monmouth to mitigate against variation. This is done in the name of quality—quality as defined by terroir, the socially agreed characteristics of a coffee’s origins. Despite this, it is clear

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Fig. 4.4  From estates around the world

that variation cannot be entirely removed, and that roasting cannot be entirely mechanized: ‘there are always variations in coffee, even from the same place...part of the fun is working with something that isn’t always the same…much less than with the old manual system, but watching what’s happening and listening to the beans tells me what they are doing’ (Interview, Holder, 2007). For Monmouth’s roasters, this is not just pushing buttons to programme a machine, it is a craft that entails sensory judgement and response, skills learned kinesthetically by/through practice: ‘it can only be learned at the knee of the roaster before you. There are no schools that teach this, just experience’ (Interview, Holder: July 2008) (Fig. 4.5). Monmouth’s shift towards greater control in the space of the roasting facility is a recurrent theme in the organization’s discourse around its specialist coffee. The discourse and practice of control refracts nature through the lens of quality so as to make visible a representation of Nature and, importantly, a representation of the places of Nature. Science is deployed

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Fig. 4.5  The science of place-making

to shape ‘raw’ nature into a finished, Natural product conforming to what Nature ought to taste like. Scientific rigor for Monmouth, however, is held in tension with decidedly individual practices and designations. The realization of quality in Monmouth’s increasingly mechanized roastery remains subject to the embodied practices and knowledges of the roasters and buyers who inhabit the space. Transforming coffee from a ‘raw’ agricultural product to something that is not ‘worthless’ requires not only knowledge of value through the material properties of coffee but also understanding how that value should be realized, based on an evaluative process of what that value means. These discursive and material tensions

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are further problematized as different agents perceive their roles as mediators of quality as they each seek to organize nature. Roasters construct profiles to preserve, enhance or exemplify flavours that have already been organized into a ‘profile’. These tensions produce a space where knowledges and understandings of coffee’s materiality are continually negotiated, so that while individual coffees are recognized and valued as being of quality, they must be transformed to express that quality. The result is a commodity that bears the marks of quality by its physicality, but must perform it through social practice that translates quality into value. As coffee moves through its spaces of production, it is physically transformed to realize its value, and concurrently socially assembled to reveal what that value means. This leads to the commoditization of quality and the commodification of coffee where exchange value is finally realized as profit. To achieve this, the knowledges, meanings and material understandings of quality must be translated from their specialized, expert forms into recognizable and meaningful understandings for the consumer: ‘The way I see [it,] quality is the way taste gets translated down to the consumer’ (Interview, Kinnell: July 2008). Monmouth Coffee actively manages this through its shops—spaces of edification as much as consumption.

Translation: Performing Quality, Realizing Value Much like the rest of the market, Monmouth’s coffee shop at Borough uses the built environment to reference a sense of heritage in their shop space. According to Anita Leroy, the company ‘fell in love with the building’, formerly a fruit-and-vegetable warehouse, and ‘didn’t want to change a thing…to retain its original character’; they kept ‘the original floor boards, and fixtures, and the bare walls’ and ‘just put in the furniture and a bit of an office’ (Interviews, Leroy: February and April 2007). Monmouth might have been growing, its roasting facilities may have been modernizing, but this was a company that started small and that finds value in rehearsing its humble beginnings. The shop, especially as sited in Borough Market with its material-semiotic shorthand for heritage as quality, reproduces Monmouth’s status as alternative—this is not a high-street coffee chain, and this is not your middle-of-the-road coffee. Practically speaking, the shop is configured to sell coffee: one section manages the sale of coffee as beverages, the other as beans. Beyond the sales counters, tables and chairs though, the shop’s furnishings function to communicate narratives of Monmouth’s quality: its ‘discovery’ of quality coffee in places of origin

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and its ‘transformation’ into taste through the craft and science of Monmouth’s roasting. Now commonplace even in mainstream coffee shops, Monmouth was one of the earliest to adorn its shops’ walls not just with evocative images of coffee and (select) aspects of its production and consumption, but also with detailed information about the ‘life’ of the specific coffees on sale. More exhibit than décor, images and text work to inform customers about Monmouth’s coffee—of expert cultivation in places of origin and skillful transformation in a ‘local’ roasting facility. Like any exhibit however, omission is as important as inclusion for the narratives on display. In the Borough Market shop, for instance, a panel depicts aspects of a coffee commodity chain. Show-casing production ‘From Fruit to Bean’ on a farm in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil (Fazenda Sau Paulo Brasil), it illustrates the lifecycle of a coffee bean from a flower, to cherry, to seed and highlights the difference between the ripe (red) and unripe (green and yellow) cherries, which is so important to the harvesting of beans. Finally, the poster describes the farm’s methods for ‘Preparing the Coffee for Roasting’: the natural method, which sees the cherries air dried so that the fruit shrivels and can be rubbed off; the pulped method in which the seed is mechanically separated from the flesh of the fruit after being soaked in water. The level of detail and the balance of photographs and text is telling, as is its position above the counter for bean sales, maintaining a position of discursive authority about coffee. Predominantly informational in content, the panel is not overtly promotional, with only a nod to Monmouth quality through its assertion that picking only starts when the coffee varietal, Red Bourbon, is fully ripened—none of those unripe green or yellow beans are allowed to sully the Monmouth taste. What is excluded from this display of Monmouth coffee production, however, is important: there are no images of plantation workers or the material culture of agriculture; there is no reference to the social production of taste profiles through cupping, nor to the social and economic implications of buying and selling coffee on contract. The geographies of production are displaced, and production space is folded into retail consumption space; the poster produces what has now classically been described as a double-­ commodity fetish (Cook and Crang 1996). Situating Monmouth’s coffee, and by proxy its consumers, into the coffee commodity chain, the poster establishes a claim to knowledge as authority—Monmouth knows coffee, it knows quality and, for those who are interested, it is ready to share certain aspects of its knowledge.

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In addition to the informative display, panels provide printed materials for customers to take away. As well as reiterating the company’s mission statement and history, these provide tasting notes alongside accounts of the places and producers of the coffees and importantly Monmouth’s relationship and visits to them. Juxtaposing seemingly objective taste descriptors with personal accounts of the company’s journey to source each of its coffees, these guides feed into Monmouth’s discourse of transparency and discovery, helping to establish the company’s expertise and knowledge as quality. This narrative technique is also a feature of the Monmouth website: each coffee available for sale online has its own page. On one side is a photograph (of a farm, smiling farmer(s), or bag of coffee) and a paragraph about the producers and/or exporters of the coffee in question, beneath which is listed the process, varietal and region of the coffee. On the other side, the name and location of the producer and any specific certification or designation (organic etc.) is listed, beneath which there is a short tasting note and the option to buy the coffee. As well as the pictorial and textual guides to coffee available in its retail spaces, sales staff are specially trained to engage and advise customers as part of the Monmouth coffee experience. Monmouth is serious about its training. Imparting expertise to staff has been central to the company ethos since Monmouth’s early days as a small company in a single site. In the Covent Garden days, Monmouth staff often worked more than one role, and sales staff with the right attitude and interest could progress to become a roaster. Even as the company grew with the acquisition of the Borough shop and first Bermondsey facility, Monmouth gave its staff the opportunity to travel to sites of origin to learn about production: It’s not just a question of giving a handout and saying here’s the information about the new arrival coffee from Rwanda; here’s the photos; it takes so much more for that information to become absorbed in not just an ­intellectual way but to have real knowledge. And we find for us, that the best way for a member of our staff to learn is by going out to origin, so all of the stuff we tell them about pulping, and washing and the washing channels and the drying tables—as soon as you see it, you get there and actually see it happen, every time we take somebody out they say “okay, I understand it now”. (Interview, Leroy: March 2007)

As well as travelling to places of origin to witness the early stages of production first-hand, sales staff are trained at the Bermondsey facility. They

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learn from Monmouth’s buyers and roasters, experts in its ‘specialist’ coffee, how to ‘taste’: what flavours they should be able to discern and how to communicate this to customers. Yet another stage of knowledge exchange and capacity building, this is vital to the effective translation of Monmouth quality (as cultivated at sites of origin and transformed at the roasting facility) to consumers. Intermediaries between end users and the professionals that drive the coffee’s journey from sites of origin via Monmouth’s roasting facility to its shops, sales staff must provide customer’s a positive coffee experience. Bad service is not tolerated; according to Anita Leroy, it is written into contracts of employment that this equates to ‘gross misconduct and instant dismissal’ (Leroy Interview: March 2007). Sales staff must not only be prepared to convey information about coffee, but also make recommendations: they are expected to find out ‘what the customer likes’ and ‘match their taste preferences to a coffee’ (Interviews, Angela Holder and A.J. Kinnell, respectively). Reliant as it is on the idea of expertise as quality and quality as taste, Monmouth’s brand depends on staff members not just selling coffee, but also selling an idea of the company’s expertise. A typical sale of coffee beans is managed according to a set model: a brief chat about the kind of coffee the customer drinks or likes, a recommendation of one of Monmouth’s beans, an encouragement to read more about the coffee and a plea to ‘come back soon’ and tell them what you thought of it. Staff normally use a language of tasting metaphor or ‘coffee speak’ and refer to select aspects of the commodity chain that brought the coffee to this Monmouth counter. The ‘intellectual’ approach to understanding coffee through photographs and handouts, which Anita argues does not work for training staff members, is offered to customers as part of Monmouth’s discourse of expertise and quality. Sales staff serve as proxy space/time travellers who discursively bring customers to places of coffee production without disclosing the full detail of its production and commodification, a phenomenon reinforced by the selective texts and images on display. Customers are invited to glimpse into Monmouth’s commodity networks to see how they might work, but access to information about the commodity and its geography is carefully controlled and orchestrated. In this way, and over time, Monmouth customers have become well versed in the company’s narratives. As pointed out by Anita Leroy, customers have ceased asking for ‘coffee’; instead, they ask for ‘a Colombian’ (Interview, Leroy: March 2007) (Fig. 4.6).

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The desire to direct the Monmouth experience continues beyond the retail space. Although the company cannot control what happens at home, it advocates certain brewing methods. In particular, it advises the use of a filter-drip system, which is used to produce Monmouth’s ‘signature drink’: We were the only people that I was aware of that was making a single cup filter with a ceramic cone. We found these ceramic cones...in Denmark. This was on Monmouth Street, we were making these cups and as far as I was aware, no one had been doing that. We’d gone on with it; it had always been located at the front of the shop so customers could see it. We didn’t want it relegated to the back... so over the years that became our signature. And, now it’s not just coffee. Someone will say I’ll have a country. A Colombian.... (Interview, Leroy: March 2007)

This brewing method is said to be ‘gentler’ so that volatile chemicals that comprise coffee’s flavours are not damaged by either too much heat (such as when automatic coffee makers heat the coffee on a hot plate) or too much water pressure and heat (like in an espresso machine).7 Although Monmouth serves some espresso-based drinks in its shops, its signature drink is the drip-filter coffee. Brewing is put on display at the front of the retail space. The ceramic filter cups used by Monmouth in the shop are also on sale, so that consumers can replicate the brewing method at home. For Monmouth, the drip-filter method helps to translate quality, since it approximates the procedures used during cupping (at origin) and is used for both training and quality assurance. As such, Monmouth achieves consistency of taste throughout the commodity network; encouraging consumers to participate in this standardized practice mitigates against the possibility of a ‘bad’ coffee experience, since other brewing methods may bring out variation in flavour. Although taste and quality are commoditized 7  To clarify this point, since Monmouth makes espresso but refuses to serve poor-quality coffee, espresso is made by forcing hot water through ground coffee at high pressures. For the coffee to withstand this kind of ‘abuse’, it must be processed with espresso in mind. Typically, espresso blends are very darkly roasted (often called an ‘Italian’ or even ‘espresso roasts), so that flavours that were once present are ‘burned away’ by roasting. This history behind this type of brewing method is that Italian colonies were unable to produce higherquality Arabica coffees, but they could grow Robustas. However, Robusta does not have desirable flavours; some liken it to ‘burned rubber’, so the Italians had to develop a method to make it palatable. First, they burned away the bad flavours by long roasting; then, to mask the burned flavour that replaced the rubber flavour, they forced hot water through it and served in small quantities.

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Fig. 4.6  Making places through commodities

and preconfigured for customers before they reach the end of the queue, by making the means of quality production available Monmouth can commodify the experience itself.

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Conclusions: An Economy of Quality The case of Monmouth Coffee illustrates that quality and value are interrelated through material and social-semiotic understandings of what quality means, and they are only ever understood as different representations of quality along the commodity chain. For coffee, value and its associated quality are reproduced periodically through social and material performances where the intrinsic notions of ‘quality’ in a coffee bean is subject to constant negotiation. As the commodity moves closer to its place of consumption, its space of production shifts from centring on material production of quality to social representations of the meaning of quality and how those meanings are valued and finally realized. This has wider implications across Borough Market where the objects available for sale are commodified through representations of quality, through which they derive their (exchangeable) value. In this case, the values are derived through material practices of transformation nature but realized discursively through the translation of those natures into Nature as a saleable commodity. These processes of transformation and translation go further than a double commodity fetish because they are both the product and the process of commodification in the first place. This means that production is consumed, not only materially as a commodity is used and discarded, but also socially, and semiotically, as an experience—an experience that ultimately shapes and governs the commodity chain.

References Berard, L. and P.  Marchenay (1995) Lieux, temps et preuves: La Construction Sociale des Produits de Terroir. Terrain 24, 153–64. Bessiaere, J. (1998). Local development and heritage: Traditional food and cuisine as tourist attractions in rural areas. Sociologia Ruralis, 38(1), 21–34. Bestor, T.C. (2004) Tsukiji: The fish market at the center of the world. Thousand Oaks, University of California Press. Bohmrich, R. (1996). Terroir: Competing perspectives on the roles of soil, climate and people. Journal of Wine Research, 7(1), 33–46. Caliskan, K. (2007). Price as a market device: Cotton trading in Izmir mercantile exchange. The Sociological Review, 55(2), 241–260. Callon, M., Meadel, C., & Rabelharisoa, V. (2002). The economy of qualities. Economy and Society, 31(2), 194–217. Coles, B. (2013). Consuming coffees and producing places: From the intimate to the global–and everywhere in between. Why we eat how we eat. London: Ashgate.

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Cook, I. (2004). Follow the thing: Papaya. Antipode, 36(4), 21. Cook, I., & Crang, P. (1996). The world on a plate. Journal of Material Culture, 1(2), 22. Daviron, B., & Ponte, S. (2005). The coffee paradox: Global markets, commodity trade and the elusive promise of development. London: Zed Books. de Melo, H. P. (2003). Coffee and development of the Rio de Janeiro economy. In W. G. Clarence-Smith & S. Topik (Eds.), The global coffee economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America 1500, 1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Pelsmacker, P., Driesen, L., & Rayp, G. (2005). Do consumers care about ethics? Willingness to pay for fair-trade coffee. Journal of Consumer Affairs, 39(2), 363–385. Demossier, M. (2000). Culinary heritage and produits de terroir in France: Food for thought. In S. Blowen, M. Demossier, & J. Picard (Eds.), Recollections of France: Memories, identities and heritage in contemporary France (pp. 141–1583). Oxford: Berghahn Books. Dicum, G., & Luttinger. (1999). The coffee book: Anatomy of an industry from crop to the last drop. New York: The New Press. Donnet, L. M., Weatherspoon, D. D., & Hoehn, J. P. (2007). What adds value in specialty coffee? Managerial implications from hedonic price analysis of central and south American E-auctions. International Food and Agribusiness Management Review, 10(3), 1–18. FitzSimmons, M., & Goodman, D. (1998). Incorporating nature: Environmental narratives and the reproduction of food. In B.  Braun & N.  Castree (Eds.), Remaking reality: Nature at the millenium (pp.  194–220). Abingdon: Routledge. Gade, D. W. (2004). Tradition, territory, and terroir in French viniculture: Cassis, France, and appellation controlee. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94(4), 848–867. James S. Duncan, (2002) Embodying colonialism? Domination and resistence in nineteenth-century Ceylonese coffee plantations. Journal of Historical Geography 28 (3):317–338. Josling, T. (2006). The war on terroir: Geographical indications as a transatlantic trade conflict. Journal of Agricultural Economics, 57(3), 337–363. Lingle, T. (1996) Growth of Specialty Coffee. Plantation Recherche Development May-June, 171–4. Ponte, S. (2002a) Standards, Trade and Equity: Lessons from the Specialty Coffee Industry. CDR Working Paper 2, 1–46. Ponte, S., & Gibbon, P. (2005). Quality standards, conventions and the governance of global value chains. Economy and Society, 34(1), 1–31. Raynolds, L. T., Murray, D., & Tayplor, P. L. (2004). Fair trade coffee: Building producer capacity via global networks. Journal of International Development, 16(8), 1109–1121.

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Renard, M.-C. (1999) The Intricities of Globalization: The Example of Fair Trade. Sociologia Ruralis 34, 484–500. Renard, M.-C. (2005) Quality certification, and regualtion and power in fair trade. Journal of Rural Studies 21, 419–31. Samper, M. K. (2003). The historical construction of quality and competitiveness: A preliminary discussion of coffee commodity chains. In W. G. Clarence-Smith & S. Topik (Eds.), The global coffee economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America 1500, 1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Topik, S., Marichal, C., & Frank, Z. (Eds.). (2006). From silver to cocaine: Latin American commodity chains and the building of the world economy 1500–2000. Durham: Duke Univ. Press. Ukers, W. (1922). All about coffee. New  York: The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company. Vitzthum, O. G. (1999). Thirty years of coffee chemistry research. In R. Teranishi, E.  L. Wick, & I.  Hornstein (Eds.), Flavor chemistry: Thirty years of progress (pp. 117–134). London: Klewer Academic.

CHAPTER 5

Vibrancy, Conviviality and Buzz: Reproducing Market and Marketplace

Abstract  If commodities are at the heart of the marketplace, then buying and selling them makes the market. This chapter brings literatures associated with puissance (Maffesoli, The time of the tribes: The decline of individualism in mass society. London: Sage, 1996a; The contemplation of the world: Figures of community style. (S.  Emanuel, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesotal Press, 1996b), the sensual turns in social sciences, and embodiment, ingestion and consumption (Abbots, The agency of eating: Mediation, food and the body. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017) together to illustrate how social-sensual relations fashioned through buying and selling transform consumption the marketplace into a multisensory experience of place in which the marketplace is consumed alongside its commodities. In particular, this chapter interrogates the ways in which vendors develop social-sensual relationships with customers to facilitate the commodity transactions that make the marketplace a market. It explores how this social-sensuality in the marketplace combines with the marketplace’s material semiotic to spread throughout the marketplace, transforming it into a consumptive experience, and it examines the ways in which this experience leads to the senses of vibrancy, conviviality and buzz that fuels the reproduction of the market and marketplace. Keywords  Buzz • Vibrancy • Social-sensuality • Place • Place-fetish © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Coles, Making Markets Making Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72865-6_5

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Buzzing Marketplace Thirty feet in from the Art-Deco portal that marks the main entrance to London’s Borough Market, the marketplace warbles. Individual voices are lost in the din as people talk, and buyers and sellers shout to be heard over each other. Espresso machines and coffee grinders make whooshing and whirring sounds (Fig.  5.1). Things clatter. The cacophony reverberates through the market hall. Whiffs of frying bacon, furtive cigarettes, fish,

Fig. 5.1  A democracy of the senses

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ripe fruit and vegetables, rubbish, coffee and coffee grounds, and a terrestrial damp smell familiar to London waft and intermingle. The floor is wet and sticky, and the walls are slimy. The air is thick with a fug that that coats glasses, throats and clothes, and leaves a taste that is distinct but not altogether separate from the foodstuffs. There are so many people inside, talking to vendors and each other, buying food, helping themselves to samples, taking pictures, looking, feeling or otherwise engaged in consumption, that movement is restricted to a shuffle. Borough Market’s democratic sensoria saturates both bodies and place (Rodaway 2002; Rhys-Taylor 2013). Even popping in to buy one or two things requires committing and submitting to the market’s social-sensual onslaught. And it’s only 10:15 on a Friday. This isn’t Provence, and there’s no sauntering here (see Duruz 2005; La Pradelle 2006), just elbows, and pushing and shoving. Borough Market is a metropolitan market in a major ‘global’ city. One buyer tells me, ‘it’s London in ‘ere mate – dirty and you have to fight’. Bodies unavoidably ‘rub along’ (Watson 2009) as they shoulder their ways amongst, between and sometimes through each other to access Borough Market’s carefully crafted stall displays, historic architecture and imagined food/food-­ traditions from which the marketplace is fashioned. Individual stalls are made from a material culture of material culture—objects associated with the foodstuffs (fishing nets for fish, apple crates for fruit, wine barrels for wine); the names and photos of producers and farmworkers, and sometimes even individual animals (‘Bessie’ the pig), are written out and hung on the walls. These rich, sensual depictions of place and geography do not so much advertise their ‘single estate coffees’ or ‘heritage’ meats, but combine within a historicized built environment to generate a material-­ semiotic that performs and folds its imagined geographies into the reproduction of the marketplace (Coles and Crang 2011). Combined with a social-sensuality, this material-semiotic is wrapped up in a commodity culture in which meanings and materialities are traded alongside each other in a frenzied, buzzing marketplace. ‘Buzz’ is onomatopoetic shorthand that encapsulates the vibe (Malbon 1999), charisma (Hansen and Verkaiik 2009; Oosterbaan 2009) or cultural scene (Silver and Clark 2013) of particular sites in particular cities. Conceptually, as well as materially, buzz is activated through multiple but often overlapping articulations. Though not exclusively urban (See Bell and Jayne 2010), buzz’s contribution to urban economies is both recognized and sometimes quantified (Arribas-Bel et  al. 2016). It is often

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associated with the efficacy of face-to-face (F2F) communication and the informal social relations that surround knowledge exchange (Storper and Venables 2004). As a seemingly vital component to creative economies, it is subsequently mobilized discursively to occupy a central position in the development, maintenance and reproduction of economic activity in cities, becoming entrenched within the circulations and flows of global capitalism, and a city’s position within these flows (Arribas-Bel et al. 2016). Comprised of a ‘noisy assemblage’ of ‘sounded doings’, (Laurier 2008; Garfinkel 2002), buzz also evokes a sense of vitality and busyness. Especially in cities, it contributes to their livability by lending individual sites identity and character (Silver and Clark 2013), attracting people to them, and transforming them into spaces of ‘(dis)enchantment’ and encounter (Watson 2013; Wilson and Darling 2016). Buzz is thus part of an alchemy that brings political and cultural economies of cities together with their everyday cosmopolitanism and (super)diversity (Neal et  al. 2015; Anderson 2011; Gilroy 2005). This chapter takes these different articulations of buzz (e.g. buzz(ing) as a socio-material phenomenon/condition; buzz(ing) as a discourse that is subject to market logics, and buzz(ing) as a conceptual tool through which a range of social, economic, cultural and political relations can be understood) on board and seeks to better understand the relationship between buzz and the places from which it is said to emerge. Such places of buzz are often sites of genteel consumption: galleries (Currid and Williams 2010), studios (Faulconbridge 2014), restaurants, cafes, music venues (Silver and Clark 2013) and, indeed, reimagined marketplaces (Coles 2014). They variously seem to buzz, but questions ultimately emerge about where it comes from and why it is associated with these places. What constitutes buzz is unclear. Drawing from notions of affective atmosphere (Anderson 2014) and puissance (Maffesoli 1996a, b), this chapter focuses on the ‘buzz’ that emerges from the social-sensual experiences of being in and part of place, and from consuming it. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which buzz emerges through the interplay between the materialities that underlie the marketplace’s material semiotics, and the socialities and sensualities that circulate throughout the marketplace. It argues that the marketplace’s buzz is produced as its social, material, sensual and semiotic relations come together in the bounded space of the market hall, and as it manifests, it fuels the marketplace’s multiple economies. This chapter argues further that through their consumption, and the visceral entanglements

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between (consuming) bodies and place that consumption implies, such places and their buzzes are reproduced.

Defining Buzz As I have argued earlier in this book, marketplaces are places where people and things come together for the buying and selling of commodities. A central question, however, is how and why people and things come together the way they do in Borough Market and to what effect they come together anyway. Malbon (1999, 22) comments: little is known about the interactional order through which life is played out at a micro, everyday... non-rational level. [Yet] this interactional order and the practices and spaces of sociality through which it is formed, reformed and navigated is at the core of consuming geographies.

Maffesoli (1996a, b: 21) uses the sociality of the ‘tribe’, its shared relations and its ‘customs’ to argue for an ‘underground centrality or social puissance’ that provides the material of adhesion for a group. Mediated by a variety of contexts, this sociality, ‘where the fact of sharing a habit, and ideology or an ideal determines the being-together [of the group] [and acts] as protection against any imposition from whatever outside source’ (Maffesoli 1996a, b: 92). In Borough Market, such sociality is produced and performed through shared social and sensual experiences revolving around the production and consumption of its commodities, as well as the experiences of being in and part of the marketplace. These experiences revolve around relationships between vendors and consumers, as well as the way in which these different human agents interact and engage with each other generating a sense of sociality as they reproduce the marketplace. Performing the Social Peter sells ‘Wild Boar’, ‘Rare Breed Pigs’, ‘Herdwick’ sheep and ‘Pedigree’ poultry. He operates a farm, located in Cumbria and a stall of the same name located in Borough Market. He and I chat regularly about Borough Market. Late on Thursday evening, Peter’s stall was just finishing its preparation for Friday, as well as concluding its weekly cooking school where ‘students’ (interested regular customers) learn how to make sausages and

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slice bacon. The products of their ‘education’ grace the shelves of Peter’s stall in the morning. The marketplace often has a readily available pool of free labour as consumers’ willingness to experience food in haptic and visceral ways leads them to participating in the production of its commodities. Vendors like Peter provide the point of engagement between customers and the foods they buy at the market. At this point, vendors are at once conduits of information about the foods they sell and are representatives of the market and the geographies the market implies. In Peter’s case, he portrays himself and other vendors at the market as spokespersons for healthy, high-quality food providing customers with knowledge about its origins and how to cook and consume it. Like Andrew, who features in Chap. 3, Peter also emerges as a figure of trust in a foodscape that has been shown (in recent years) to be decidedly untrustworthy. A deeper reading, however, also illustrates a degree to which Peter performs this role as ‘butcher/farmer’ to customers and, indeed, to me. He appears as a gregarious farmer made good by an emerging market where he can sell his products that are specifically labelled to convey this very image. Like Andrew, Peter materializes as a farmer, and as a trustworthy sage bestowing information and ‘ethos’ to customers alongside his rare-breed pork products. His cooking school, at once a resource to educate his customers about the veracity and quality of product, helps deepen the relations of trust between him and his customers. It also provides a way for customers to participate in the operation of Borough Market by bringing them into place and forming a ‘community’ of regular customers who assemble around the practice of butchery. Johnny, one of Borough Market’s bread sellers, emphasizes the idea that the marketplace is more than a place of commodities: it’s [the market] about people. Look at how [Fetz] talks with customers…[you] have this interaction with people, the customers, you talk with them, joke, get to know them…Borough Market is about interaction... markets are a performance. It’s acting; its giving a bit of yourself to sell your product.

Characterization and then acting the role of vendor is important. ‘Proper characterization makes any drama seem natural, believable, spontaneous and real’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999: 112). Borough Market, as noted earlier, trades on feeling ‘real. Pine and Gilmore  (1999: 113), citing the

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example of a soda jerk who ‘spins lines like “who’s next to be refreshed,”’ further write that ‘his acting is better than that of some of the movie stars on the screen. Guests want to wait in his queue’. It is little wonder that many vendors in Borough Market are also actors working the marketplace part-time to make ends meet elsewhere. At Borough Market, however, these performances, the interactions, and ultimately the sense of creating social relations and embedding them with familiar meaning leads back to the function of the market. Vendors engage with customers and form relations with them not only to ‘get to know them’, but also to sell them products. For customers, the intimacy of these relations returns to an idea of trust that underlies Borough Market’s sense of alterity. The vendors at Borough Market, however, produce a contextualized form of sociality to hook customers into an experience of alterity portrayed through performance of meaningful social relations. Beyond a source of labour, Peter’s food school, for instance, provides a readily available customer base for his products. In the process of the school, customers learn a bit about meat production for this particular farm, as well as attune themselves to the commodities of the marketplace (see Abbots 2017; Carolan 2011). Validating the sign economy in a market like Borough Market is important because markets are often seen as less formal; they provide a shopping experience without obligation (de La Pradelle 2006). A condition of this, however, is that since there is no openly formalized system of quality control, marketplaces rely on their visual-material culture (as argued earlier in this book), but also on their produced sociality in order to reproduce their economic function. The seemingly informal space of the Borough Market is formalized through de facto sociality. Borough Market’s vendors deploy this sociality, producing meaningful social relations, in order to make a sale. The side benefit may well be an enriched shopping experience, but the experience is still predicated on consumption, implicating sociality as part of the commoditization inherent within Borough Market. The exchange of money often appears as an afterthought, but only because the meaningfully embedded social relations that occur between vendors and customers are precisely calculated to achieve that effect. Relating Consumers Stephen and I are sipping coffee before he and I set out to ‘do a shop’. Stephen is a long-time shopper at Borough Market and knows quite a few

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vendors. We often discuss perceptions of Borough Market and what differentiates it from other modes of food provision: I try to do all of the shopping here. I don’t go to supermarkets…I can’t stand them – they’re so dead, no interaction, dreary. I have loo roll delivered (laughs)...I was here at the beginning, though…We all know each other, vendors and us regulars – not the tourists! we’d been looking for something like this.

Stephen makes a direct comparison between the liveliness of Borough Market and the dead-ness of mainstream supermarkets. Whether he admits it or not, this statement signals that although Stephen is there for quality products, quality is attached to the experience of finding it, an experience to be had by engaging with the place. A different set of processes are at work, however. Stephen identifies himself as being part of a group of ‘regulars’ shoppers, and vendors who gather in Borough Market because its provides an experience far different from that of supermarkets, not only because it is supermarket, but because Borough Market’s commodities are generally unavailable anywhere else, let alone supermarkets. This seemingly subversive, or at least secretive, culture of commodities at Borough Market, is predicated on social and material relations and customs, relations that take on the appearance of Maffesoli’s rituals of underground centrality. Besides food, Borough Market offers (offers) opportunities for its customers to interact with producers and sellers engaging in relations ranging from informal chats, to exchanges of knowledge about ‘what’s good’ and what constitutes quality. In the process these gatherings help develop a sociality of regulars within the space of the market. As Shields (1992: 16) comments, ‘the individual is re-spatialized to a form more dependent on social and spatial context. Consumption for adornment, expression and group solidarity become not merely means to a lifestyle, but the enactment of a lifestyle’. In Stephen’s case, the social-spatial context is Borough Market, and that lifestyle is one of leisure-class food consumption, ‘foodies’, where the meanings and discourses associated with Borough Market act as a tribal totem for wider cultural reproduction. The reproduction of culture through consumption, however, leads to the reproduction of space within Borough Market’s commodity system. Unlike the sociality surrounding Peter’s food school, where anyone who shows up is admitted, membership to Stephen’s tribe is regulated and membership limited to those that fall within his social circle of Borough

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Market regulars. Stephen demarcates these social boundaries by hinting at underlying tensions between regulars and tourists. This tension indicates a shift in the marketplace from a site of ‘authentic’ (foodie) culture comprised of likeminded people seeking particular types of commodities, to that of a consumptive experience for the tourists. By defining all non-­ authentic users of the marketplace as ‘tourists’, and striking a decidedly elitist, class-biased tone, Stephen portrays them as non-reflexive consumers in search of authentic experiences (MacCannell 1976), rather than connoisseur guardians of Borough Market’s foodie culture-cum-­ostensible political project. Jackson (1999: 101) suggests that such tensions raise questions of ‘authentification’, which means ‘identifying those who make claims for authenticity and the interests that such claims serve’. In the case of Stephen, such claims to authenticity are self-serving. Stephen wants to maintain the cultural capital that he perceives Borough Market provides him. Vendors, who depend on growing markets for their commodities, are seeking to generate a Borough Market where they can sell their products. This central tension between a small cadre of regular consumers who celebrate the marketplace, and maintain a sense of exclusivity around it, and a crowded and congested market hall is one source of the Borough Market’s buzz.

Performing the Marketplace As noted earlier in this chapter, Borough Market is a place where people and things come together for the purposes of buying and selling (Fig. 5.2). Sociality is implicitly tied to the marketplace’s material culture, as well as to its performances. Social relations form around commodities as customers seek out places where they can not only consume, but where they can be perceived as being ‘in the know’ about both the commodities they are buying and the ‘best’ vendors from whom to buy them. The following conversation occurred between Arnaud, owner of a wine shop located in Borough Market until 2012, and a customer. It is a verbatim transcription from my field notes. It’s a Friday afternoon. The market is busy, and I am downstairs in Bedales (wine cellar) chatting with Bedales’s Managing Director Arnaud, a wine producer from Montefalco (Italy) and a sales representative. On the table in front of us are several bottles of wine, some water, and a price guide detailing the specifics of the wine we taste. Periodically, customers come down the stairs, appearing as if they have just discovered something unexpected; they

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Fig. 5.2  Producing and consuming a marketplace

hesitate, perceiving something important is happening, that there is business taking place. Inevitably, they turn to leave, but Arnaud always invites each inside to have a look around. After a few moments browsing, Arnaud asks each one, ‘Have you found your inspiration?’ He asks, then points out two bottles in a dark corner. ‘It’s smooth and powerful, Syrah grape, from the south of France, hot and fiery. But that one here is more delicate, a bit more mysterious, hidden... superb...’ The customer agrees and wants to purchase the ‘mysterious one,’ (also from the South of France). ‘Excellent.’ And Arnaud, peeling the price tag from the bottle and sticking it to the wall proceeds to wrap it separately in tissue chapter, before placing the bottle into a carrier bag with ‘Bedales’ and some graphics on the side. He then writes down the price, types it into the till, gives the customer the total. If the customer pays with cash (a rare thing here) Arnaud selects ‘cash’

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from a computerized cash register. If the customer pays with a card, Arnaud selects ‘card,’ places it in the machine and without fail says, ‘enter your magic number.’ After the transaction is complete, Arnaud hands this customer the receipt and bag of wine wishes them a good day. This exact procedure occurs multiple times in an hour, with multiple  customers and multiple bottles of wine. Later, other, more-well known, regular customers come in, Arnaud invites them to taste wines that a producer has brought in ‘have a special treat’ whilst browsing. It is common, as what happened on this day, to have seven or eight people gathered around the table chatting about their days and talking through a new wine that may or may not make it to the shop, depending on Arnaud’s and possibly our opinions. I can only imagine how producers would feel if they knew their wines were scrutinized by seemingly random people off the street. Arnaud would later say to me: ‘I want wine to be an experience, a good meal, or better, a geography where the place it is made becomes part of its own story, my story and, more importantly a customer’s...but the experience has to be special and have its own story. I remind them of their first girlfriend under the tree—which was actually my girlfriend when I was 15 after we walked for a while and decided to picnic where the Camembert began to smell...’ ‘[this changes] people’s perceptions about wine; what’s the point of telling someone what a wine tastes like. It’s better to tell them what it makes me feel when I drink it, and share a story’.

Such performances are similar across the market, revealing much about the way Borough Market’s products, and Borough Market itself, are marketed. Capturing customers with an unexpected sample and asking about ‘their inspirations’ sets them up for the commodity transactions that follow. Inviting a customer to participate in a narrative, however contrived, allows for a more complete production of an experience. Commodity transactions, however, are hidden within such performances, and experiences of consumption are within the wider commodity system. Superficially sales rituals such as these work to de-commoditize commodities, populating them with personal experiences and histories. In the process, however, commodities are fashioned as totems, fetishes for memory and emotion, which form the basis for continued social relations (Douglas and Isherwood 1996). As Arnaud wraps the bottles, wine, or,

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more significantly, a presumed and expected experience surrounding its consumption, is translated into a ‘priceless’ object as the price tag is physically removed, and the geography on the label obscured. The bottle is then placed into a branded carrier as a reminder of where the experience came from. The ‘magic number’ further emphasizes the mysterious transformation process and acts to de-commodify the experience. Further mystified by the credit card transaction, the act of monetary transaction is banished into a spectral  realm of fictitious and displaced capital. In the lived social space of the shop, the experience of the commodity, wine, rather than the commodity itself, ‘serves as a pole of attraction for postmodern tribes. In this sense the image and what I call the “imagined object” are opposed to rationalism and to the distant ideal that prevailed throughout modernity’ (Maffesoli 1996b: XV).

Leaky Space(s) and the Sensescape of the Market Borough Market is busy, noisy and bursting with wonderful produce. It’s best to come early and bring a large, strong bag or a shopping trolley. If you’re not familiar with the produce on the stalls, or you’re not sure how to cook it, just ask: the traders will be delighted to tell you about their specialities, where they come from and how to make the most of them. Look round carefully before you buy  – the Market sells some expensive delicacies but there are also lots of delicious cheaper cuts of meat and good-value seasonal fish, vegetables and fruit...Borough Market is rather a maze, but exploration yields delicious rewards! (Borough Market 2007)

The sociality of the market is mediated through material culture and its exchange. At the same time, contributing to the market’s sociality and reinforcing its experiential economy is a discourse that Borough Market is like no other place. As the trustee’s write, it ‘is busy, noisy’ and also ‘bursting with wonderful produce’ suggesting to come early and fill a large bag with purchases. It is clear that those in charge of the market want people to come, experience the marketplace and consume. In contrast to Stephen’s desire to maintain exclusivity, the trustees construct a marketplace that at once seems outside the realm of expectation, phantasmagorical even, but at the same time universally accessible. Borough Market meets the needs and desires of all classes of consumers by inviting everyone to consume it conspicuously—first, through exploration, then through commodity exchange and, finally, as Borough Market itself becomes ‘delicious’,

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through transforming and translating consumption at the market to consumption of the market. As I have argued previously, meanings are embedded into the marketplace through largely visual material-semiotic processes, yet experiences in the market goes beyond the visual by becoming fully sensual. This experiential economy is based around how the senses are perceived, and though it may be anchored visually, the experience itself depends on how the visual complements the non-visual of the market. If Borough Market is predicated on the idea that its foods taste better, then the act of tasting becomes paramount for the sensory experiences in the market. Taste at the market, however, is contextual and is framed by materiality that leads to individual tastes and its discourses. Taste also depends on its presentation in and amongst the other senses, senses that because of the materiality of Borough Market’s environment are free to roam the market. Sensuality thus circulates within its spaces, and Borough Market is fashioned to produce a richly textured ‘sense’ of place (Relph 1976a, b) that can be consumed through the senses alongside its commodities. As Rodaway (2002: 4) notes: The senses are not merely passive receptors of particular kinds of environmental stimuli but are actively involved in the structuring of that information and are significant in the overall sense of a world achieved by the sentient. In this way, sense and reality are related.

As a result, Borough Market not only looks but also feels (tastes, smells and sounds, as well as looks) like a real marketplace. With its visual-material culture, experiences in Borough Market materialize through representations of a wider sensuous landscape. The market is often very crowded particularly on weekends. Long-distance visual navigation is difficult within the confined passageways of the market hall. At the same time, this condition opens the prospect of rubbing up against someone or something. Cooking foods, fresh produce, even the buildings, streets and rubbish give off individual smells as well as combine into a general aroma—a sort of Borough Market fecundity. People talking, music playing, trains rumbling overhead are likewise differentiable and simultaneously cacophonous. Food itself is the stuff of tastes, and it is little wonder that a market founded on the prospect of better tasting food would seek to showcase it as much as possible. As with the material-semiotic, individuality is supplanted by a market-wide sensorium, variously engaged,

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disengaged and distanciated based on the other relations of the marketplace, as well as those of the body and its movements through the market hall. Though no single sensory modality comprises the market, they come together to define not only the market’s spatial leakiness, but also its identity as a place, ‘displacing the normal dominance of the visual medium’ (Henriques 2003: 452). As a result, sense-spaces are likewise shaped by market’s built environment, bleeding into each other to produce a market-­ scape of the senses that materializes in the market’s commodities to form an experience-based sensual economy. The Sights Though Chap. 3 considered the market’s visual economy as a production and performance of meaning, it only alluded to the visual as consumable experience within the marketplace. Yet, Borough Market’s visual culture is consumed along with its commodities. In addition, it acts as a critical tool that entices a wider sensory engagement with the market—representing visually what market foods ought to be: ‘fresh’, ‘local’(ized), in abundance and, importantly, of the countryside (or perhaps ‘landscape’). As Michele de La Pradelle (2006 (1996)) comments, marketplaces are an an enchanted world where stall holder talent combines with customer desire to make products appear different from what they are...“Pumpkins are rounder at the market.”

This relationship between visual perception and materiality implies what Shields (2004: 24) refers to as ‘visualicity’, where the ‘relationship between the visible and the invisible, their communication and the correlation of this relation with other divisions such as the tangible and intangible’. The sensory experience at Borough Market, visual impairment notwithstanding, is unavoidably visual, and ‘seeing’ at the market produces other forms of stimulation that contribute to experience at the market. Visualicity at Borough Market, however, also leads to the production of the market as an image that along with foodstuffs is waiting to be consumed. The visual of Borough Market extends beyond the suggestive layout of food. As an enticement to further sensory experience, food itself becomes the subject and object of objectification, appearing as reified images that represent consumption experiences. A wider visual material culture around

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food and the sensory stimulus within Borough Market contributes to the production and consumption of the ‘the market’ as an image as well as producing a consumable object of ‘the market imaginary’. Visitors to the market frequently ‘capture’ food through photographs. Through the camera lens, foodstuffs can be consumed visually, and vicariously as one form of consumption is substituted for another. That these images are of food only furthers the point. Reproducing representations of food through photography reinforces a timeless and static gaze within the marketplace defeating ‘the otherness and autonomy of passive reified object[s]’ as the ‘focus of vision[s], assumed to be fully exposed across representational space’ (Shields 2004: 25). Together, these processes form a critical relationship between the sensory experience and materiality, both of which are to be consumed. As a part of a wider ‘foodie culture’, places like Borough Market promote and (reproduce) such a visual economy of food and marketplace that both enables consumption and stimulates further engagement with its sensorium. The Sounds A din washes over the body as it steps inside the market hall from its entrance on Borough High. Chatting voices, coffee machines, music, frying food, rumbling trains from above come across as a singular thing, a medium pitch just below white noise. People are talking, and customers are arguing about how good their hamburger is. Farther away, the vegetable seller is crying, ‘strawberries, two punets for a pound!’ In the middle distance, an opera singer sings an aria about fresh orange juice as he is pressing oranges into a juicing machine before selling it to a customer. All of this becomes overshadowed by the noise of someone’s wheelbarrow with metal bands on its wheels clattering over cobblestones. A coffee grinder churns through coffee, while an espresso machine makes its whooshing noise. The combined effect is the production of freshly made coffee. All the while, the background noise peaks and troughs in some sort of cycle echoing through the galleried ceiling, occasionally peppered by a distinctive sound, a voice, a child’s cry, a peculiar noise that draws everyone’s attention for a moment before returning to general fray. These are the sounds of a market, of selling and buying; it is the sound of Borough Market. As with the visual, sound is likewise important to Borough Market. It emerges as cacophonic, an indistinguishable ‘wall of noise’, as agents

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within the market produce sound. Beyond just noise, individual sounds are discernible, and communicate information, while the assemblage of sound creates the atmosphere of the market, a soundscape, characterizing and structuring space and place. Borough Market is a low fidelity (lo-fi) soundscape produced by overlapping sound-fields constructed through individual sound events (Rodaway 2002). Individually, sounds events represent a commodity experience: a tasty hamburger; coffee; the movement of commodities through the marketplace on a wheel barrow or their availability from particular vendors. The blending of sounds, however, reinforces the spatial leakiness of the market hall, serving as a reminder that materials in the marketplace are often unfixed, as well as detached from commodities. Simply put, sound flows, seeping and overlapping from individual transmitters to become part of the market’s clamour, contributing to the system of meanings about place and consumption generated by the marketplace’s material-­ semiotic. The overall impression simply becomes one of ‘marketplace’, rather than of particular commodities from particular places. This is important to the reproduction of the market because it illustrates the ways in which its sensual experiences is passively as well as actively received, meaning that consumers for lack of better words are awash in the market, and the commodity transactions it engenders. The Smells As with its sites and sounds, walking through Borough Market, reveals its smell, or, rather, its smells, comprised of many different things that come together, assembling into a particular marketplace smell. This ‘smell’ comes from multiple sources, some leftover, like spilt beer and stale cigarettes from the night before, others contemporary from the day’s trading. Meat frying on grills, especially bacon used in bacon sandwiches, seems to permeate the market hall, though it competes with the peculiar and strong odour of melting Raclette cheese, also for sandwiches. Vegetables give off a fecund dampness of soil that typically clings to roots, smelling of the ground in which they were grown and the place where they were produced. Later their smell betrays decay. Then there is fish, smelling nicely of the sea when fresh in the morning but smelling ‘fishy’ when they too begin to rot—it is little wonder that the term ‘it smells fishy’, is used to connote a bad trade deal (see Coles and Hallett 2012). Rubbish figures heavily in Borough Market, the (bi)product of commerce consisting of

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scraps, what cannot be sold, and residual slag remaining after food processing—orange pulp, used coffee grounds and other bits of food not completely consumed. Generally it is confined to ‘out back’, but if the bins are not removed quickly, its smell soon permeates the market’s entirety, and in the summer the smell of rubbish lingers. Some smells are stronger than others, and those that are sometimes good also seem to get in the way, often of other smells like when a cheese sandwich wafts into a glass of wine. The Borough Market smell makes up an important component of its experience, signalling marketplace, but not inviting too much further critique of what that means in practice. Like the other senses, Borough Market is encompassed by a ‘smellscape’ that defines its spatiality, but at the same contributes to its sense of dislocation and ambiguity (Porteous 2006). It is little wonder that smells, particularly food smells, are often powerful reminders of the past, evoking nostalgia, generating longing and provoking consumption (Sutton 2006). Smell in Borough Market also reinforces the market’s commodity space by providing olfactory clues to its economy of quality alongside contributing to the character and atmosphere of the marketplace. For instance, with respect to vegetables and fish, ‘fresh smelling’, of the soil or of the sea respectively, illustrates their desirable material qualities freshness. With wine or cheese, smell becomes a marker of place and provenance, smelling like places of production, and further commoditizing those geographical representations (Barham 2003). The processes of smell and smelling also enliven the marketplace and become a social medium for its lived experiences (Low 2005). Residual smells from the night before, stale beer and cigarettes, as well as those of rubbish, as cooking food and drink are a reminder that Borough Market is not just a contrived theme park but a lively, lived space generating authentic cultural experiences (see: Relph 1976a, b; Tuan 1977). Such smells differentiate Borough Market from the sterility of the supermarket (whose cultural experiences should be regarded as no less profound or authentic). They ‘magnify the role of sensations in producing sociality and identity, as well as reproducing a sensory order and culture’ (Waskul et al. 2009: 10), helping to reinforce the marketplace’s position as a site of alternative food provision. The lived smells that are produced Borough Market are in contrast to artificial chemical smells that are utilized to imbue other places with a contrived sense of meaning (Drobnik 2005). Placeless supermarkets, for instance, inject the smell of baking

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bread into their aisles, to affect a sense of home. These smells, suggestive of a meaning rich place, overtly commoditize the very notions they try to portray (Davies et  al. 2003). Borough Market has a smell (or a set of smells) of its own, and that sets it apart. The Feel of the Place Haptic sensations likewise inform experience in the marketplace. Indeed, in what some might call a democracy (see Rhys-Taylor 2017), people ‘rub’ together in its confined market hall, reinforcing and destabilizing social and economic norms (Watson 2009). Touch and touching, and texture informs quality. Stephen tells me how he buys fish. Looking first at the eyes to see if they’re cloudy [a sign of long dead fish], Stephen then gives each a prod, feeling along the loin. ‘This bream’s squishy’, he says to the vendor, ‘[but] the trout has good, firm flesh’, he says inviting me to give the fish a poke. Indeed, it is firm fleshed and thus apparently fresh. A similar thing happens with a cheese merchant, Herve. He hands me a small piece of goat cheese from the Midi-Pyrenees region of France. It is gooey and sticks to my fingers, a sign that it is aged and ready to eat. Touching in the marketplace also invites compulsiveness and disgust. I watch a toddler reach out to touch the fur of a dead deer, hanging from one butcher’s stalls and dripping blood onto the floor. A parent rushes and grab’s the child’s arm, and says something I can’t hear. A few seconds later, the toddler runs back, this time going after the blood on the floor. The parent rushes over again, dragging the child away. I still can’t hear what is spoken, but as they walk off, hands firmly held, the child keeps looking back towards the dead animal. Like the other sense, touch can be subversive in the market, establishing or breaking down commodity transactions. Steven was able to determine which fish was good and, importantly, which fish was bad, judging its feel. For supermarkets, and other more mainstream sites of food provision, this is unheard of. The sense of touch can reinforce, but also destabilizes the visual-economy. ‘At fairs the crowds were conditioned to the principle of advertisements: “look but don’t touch.” And taught to derive pleasure from spectacle alone’ (Buck-Morss 1989: 85). At Borough Market, however, the spectacle is about consumption, and consumption goes beyond the visual as the crowds, like Stephen, are enticed to touch the market through its commodities. Touching is crucial to the reproduction to the economy because it establishes value. Howes (2005: 298–299)

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notes that ‘the exchange-value expressed in the money equivalent is however nothing more than the ghost of the commodity, whereas the senses of the commodity are palpable, and subject to multiple appropriations’. The texture of the fish appropriates value by precluding the economic transaction. It became a surrogate sign value for the fish’s quality. In the process, the feel of the fish’s flesh is commoditized, representing a wider sensual discovery in consumer culture that centres on the pleasure of feeling in the body (Paterson 2007). According to Low (2005), market shopping is fun, and in Borough Market it is fun because it is touchable. The Tastes One vendor is standing amidst the throng with divided plate containing samples. She sells dried fruit, nuts and variations on dried fruit and nuts. Other vendors hand out samples of strange, familiar or even revisited cheeses, cakes, bits of cooked sausage, bacon all on toothpicks. Wine, cider, Real Ale and fruit juices are often in little plastic cups. These bits of food act as edible advertisements. Johnny, a baker, tells me: samples are important because they show that we’re different and better than anyone else. The difference between our products and another’s is in the taste. That’s where all of those production things we were talking about come through. You can tell a customer about better cropping, organic fertilizer, all of that, but at the end of the day, it’s taste that matters to them. That’s why they’ll spend the extra money and if the taste isn’t there, and the quality, then they won’t come back. Taste is what this market’s all about.

Borough Market has a smellscape, a soundscape, a visual landscape, as well as a haptic geography. What about taste? Can there be such thing as a ‘taste-scape’ of the market? Brillat-Savarin (2005: 16), writes that, taste has two functions: ‘it invites us by pleasure to repair the continual loss brought about by life. It assists us to select, from among the diverse substances that nature presents, those that nourish us best.’ As a term, however, taste is problematic as it denotes both educated materialities of consumption and the dynamic biophysicality associated with ingesting (Abbots 2017). For Trubek (2008: 260), ‘in the act of tasting...the body, culture and nature become one.’ Taste at Borough Market works across this continuum referring to the biophysical, for example how something tastes (usually in relation to something somewhere else), as well as to differentiate consumers and the type of consumption represented by the

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marketplace. It also serves as a transcendental moment of ‘realization’ between the material, the cultural and the discursive. Tasting connects the biophysical processes of the body with the symbolic power of a market, becoming the final act food consumption (before digestion) that collapses the space between sign and use values into a point where discourses of the marketplace are legitimized by their internalization. Indeed, somewhere between the bottom of the stomach and the end of the colon, the meanings that envelope the fetish of the commodity evaporate into a memory of consumption. Borough Market, for whatever reasons is a place where the cognoscenti of food do their shopping. Simply consuming at Borough Market is enough to be part of that scene. Education and understanding taste is important to the marketplace. The superior production methods that underlie the foods at Borough Market, the material-semiotics that bracket consumption and multi-sensory experiences of consumption available within the marketplace are irrelevant unless the difference between Borough Market and other outlets for food can be realized by consumers who can taste the difference. Taste, and the performance of taste, represents the end of a long chain of sensual experiences that lead to the (re) production of the market as a place where the buying and selling of foods occurs. Samples provide a sensory link between discourses of the marketplace, the ‘fun’ sensory experience that it engenders and the commodity relations that reproduce the market. Samples also offer a didactic opportunity for new consumers to be educated about food and taste, but such education is limited to its performance in Borough Market. The performance of quality through taste is what Borough Market is about in the first place. And, as a self-referential site of meaning and experience, taste and tasting is a device (see Callon 2016) that signifies differences in the marketplace’s socialities and generating distinction to the marketplace itself. Tasting, and more broadly the availability of tastes, not only contributes to the sense of place; it helps to reproduce and reinforce the other economies that reproduce the marketplace.

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The Buzz: Towards A(nother) Geography of Borough Market The first section of this chapter argues that the sociality of Borough Market is mediated by different social and material agents within the market. It contends that relations between vendors, customers and objects (sometimes fashioned as commodities) come together to produce the marketplace. It deploys Maffesoli’s (1994) notion of puissance to denote the intangible yet apparent and felt force of social-material bonds that are vital to sociality and that ultimately provide the vitality of Borough Market. The second section argues that beyond the material and social relations of puissance, Borough Market is comprised of sensory experiences that circulate throughout the market hall, giving Borough Market visceral meaning as well as providing the final impetus for the commodity transactions that reproduce the market. This section interrogates the combined effects of these materialities, socialities and sensualities as they culminate into Borough Market’s buzz. It contends that though Borough Market is essentially a commoditized space, this designation is dependent on elements that occur beyond its commodity systems. The basis for this argument stems from the notion that objects appear and disappear as commodities throughout their ‘lives’. Therefore, it stands to reason that the commoditization of space(s) within Borough Market fluctuate as commodities emerge and depart producing the potential for commoditization that is only realized once commodity transactions take place. The tourists, shoppers, and vendors, as well as things that await purchase assemble at the marketplace emitting sensory indicators. As they coalesce, they produce the raw material for the market’s buzz. Whether it buzzes, however, depends on the ordering of the otherwise chaotic marketplace. (Re)defining the Buzz Buzz is typically used to signal the ‘combined effects of efficient communication, the means of overcoming difference in uncertain environments, and the social-psychological mechanisms and motivations that lead to face-to-face communication (F2F)’ (Storper and Venables 2004: 364–5). This implies that buzz enables the sociality that both brings economic actors together and facilitates the social relations whereby economic conventions are negotiated and established (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006). Buzz thus plays a vital role in commodity transactions and economic

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reproduction more generally, and indeed cities, as much as the economic markets that comprise them are expected to buzz (Thrift 2004; Silver and Clark 2013; Arribibas-Bel et al. 2016). Buzz signals the perceptible, yet unquantifiable, energy and excitements around such transactions, generated through ‘social consumption’ and ‘cultivated’ through a ‘social milieu’ of interactions that ‘rely on close spatial proximity of people, events and institutions’ in ‘particular locales’ (Currid and Williams 2010: 7, 8). Buzz is therefore unavoidably placed, emerging from the experiences of being in and part of its reproduction. Borough Market constitutes the impetus that makes people want to participate in its social, cultural and material reproduction, which in turn drives its economy. It derives from notions of ‘puissance’, a social force that holds together social-cultural assemblies (Maffesoli 1996a), and the sociality generated when vendors and customers interact within the marketplace. Though intangible, the sense of puissance is felt within Borough Market as a force that binds it together. I argue, however, that its emergence occurs as relations are produced and performed because of commodity transactions. It thus makes sense that the buzz in Borough Market emerges from the social, material and discursive processes of commodity consumption, combined with the socialities and sensualities, which are likewise consumed as part of the marketplace. In order to understand these affective processes, it is necessary to reconsider the assemblies that lead to the market’s buzz. This section argues first that buzz in the market comes from a critical mass of people, things and ideas within the marketplace that coalesce to generate buzz. It then interrogates the relationship between Borough Market’s critical mass(es) and the sensory experience and its impact in producing the market’s buzz. Finally, this section considers buzz in the market as a state of being once all of the pieces are put together. Critical Mass Recurring themes in discussions about the emergence of marketplace contribute to this understanding of Borough Market’s buzz (Fig. 5.3). One is that Borough Market, seemingly ‘appeared out of nowhere’ to grow into this ‘unexpected, nearly unmanageable, completely indefinable...thing’— as numerous vendors told me one evening after the market was shut for the day. Indeed, Borough Market’s near-absolute success (visible both in profits and evidenced by popularity) emerged before ‘anyone had any idea

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Fig. 5.3  Buzzing market

what was going on’. This sudden explosion at Borough Market carried consequences, one of which is that the market’s managers struggled to develop a clear vision for its continued development. Yet, while all vendors acknowledge the abrupt growth of the marketplace, none (that I have spoken to), when asked directly, have any idea why this phenomenon happened, except by suggesting that it had something to do with Borough Market being ‘of its time’ coinciding with a consumer desire for more ‘wholesome foods’ and a ‘better understanding of foods’ production systems’. Indeed, Borough Market captured a zeitgeist in which food production systems were increasingly scrutinized by consumers who had the economic and social capital to afford to change their modes of provision. The reinvention of food, however, has its origins in the environmental movements of the late 1960, which ultimately are comprised of a long set of (probably well founded) anti-industrial discourses that can be variously traced to the beginning of the industrial revolution and probably before (see, for

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instance: Worster 1988; Wright 1990; Goodman and Watts 1997; Mitchell 2002). The various food crises that pushed Borough Market’s early producers and vendors to seek out new modes of production and new markets can likewise be viewed as capitalism’s seemingly never-ending capacity to cannibalize itself before generating and colonizing new spaces. Along with Borough Market being of its time, the other recurring theme in discussions around the marketplace’s mercurial ascendance was continued reference to its ‘critical mass’. ‘You need a critical mass of people, of traders and customers’; ‘like all things, it’s a critical mass that makes it [the market work]’: [t]hink of the space, the market’s geography. All of the people, the things, the ideas; they come together here in the hall...it’s this critical mass that gives the market its energy, and it’s the critical mass, and the energy it produces, that has changed the market, and will...[eventually] destroy it.

In general terms, critical mass refers to the condition before a sudden collapse of matter, where there is sufficient accumulation of material to produce an unchecked chain reaction. In the process the reaction releases an abundance of energy that continues the reaction until all matter within the reaction is consumed. At which time, the reaction is over. Critical mass suggests a precise coordinate in space–time when enough matter has been accumulated, implying a moment, point, ‘singularities-event’ that correspond[s] to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather “metastable,” [and is] endowed with a potential energy...(the energy of the pure event, whereas forms of actualization correspond to the realization of the event). (Deleuze 2004: 119)

Thus, the appearance of Borough Market as the result of a ‘critical mass’ suggests that the market is a point of converging people, things and ideas, which are reproduced by a ‘metastable’ organization of potential energy that, once critical, unleashes Borough Market and produces its buzz. The Market Buzzing Working in Borough Market, there are times when the hours pass slowly. Not much is happening, few sales are made, and though it might be

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crowded, sometimes maybe too crowded, something isn’t right. There are other times when hours fly by. Sales are rung up one after another, and stocks drain away; it’s fun, exciting and the only accountings for what just happened are the visibility of smiling customers clutching shop-branded bags and the totted-up receipts at the end of a couple hours—‘we just did two-and-half-grand; let’s get some lunch.’ When it is buzzing, Borough Market is all-consuming. As it approaches critical mass of materiality, sociality and sensuality, it is pulling people, things and ideas into its confined space, compressing them, and feeding off them. Once the marketplace gets going, it keeps going, and the marketplace forms and reforms. It is as if some kind of potential energy bound up in the abstractions of the commodity form is released through exchange. This energy is palpable and infectious; it seems to fuel the marketplace and market, powering further exchange and becoming another force holding the constituent relations the marketplace together. Sales ring up quickly across the marketplace, and time seems to fly when the market is in ‘the zone’ (Pettinger 2017). It is little wonder that many people, vendors and customers alike, have a coffee cup seemingly glued to their hands. Not only does a hot drink ward off the damp, it delivers a stimulant, making bodies in the marketplace physically buzz. Mintz (1985) famously discusses how sugar fuelled empire—providing a mode of exchange to generate profit from colonial (slave) labour as well as cheap calories to reproduce an industrial labour force. Coffee, and other kinds of food—pastries and cakes and a huge range of ‘fast’ food—play a similar role in Borough Market, not only stimulating buzzing bodies and trade but also acting as objects of trade in themselves. Borough Market’s sensoria—the blending of its visual milieu, its cacophony, the mixing of its smells, tastes and touches on the trading floor—lead to the embodiment of the marketplace. Engaged through the senses, this buzz reflects a direct biophysical response to the materialities of the marketplace, which in turn shapes the social relations of exchange. The people who make Borough Market buzz, its buyers and sellers, are likewise consumed by its ‘world filled with forces’ (Stoller 2010: 54). They consume and are consumed it. By making the body, and bodies, feel the marketplace, buzz makes the market and marketplace. Buzz results from the dynamic between the feelings of the body and the feeling of the place (Anderson 2014), which is central to the reproduction of marketplaces. Market traders are said to rely on their gut instincts, reading the market, and responding to how it feels (Zaloom 2006; Borch et al.

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2015). In Borough Market, sellers tweak stalls and sales rapports to attract new customers, changing and adapting to the ebbs and flows of the market. Market and marketplace are thus reproduced through the collective feelings of assembled bodies and the actions they take as a result. Buzz in the marketplace also implies a state of being where the perception of time is replaced by market function—when the marketplace metastasizes into pure economy, and is experienced through continuous commodity transactions. Yet, the commodity form is only part of an object’s life and is organized through cultural and material negotiations. The objects for sale at Borough Market have a dual status; they were once commodities, and they will be commodities again when their exchange values are realized at the moment of transaction. At which point, the object is transformed into a commodity, and, crucially for vendors, out of the transformation, money is made (and we can get something to eat). Like matter, commodities do not change phase without the release or capture of energy, and it takes an input (or deletion) of energy for change to occur. The making of money—the capture or extraction of surplus value—is one consequences of the commoditization of an object. Energy, however, also manifests as the by-product of transaction and is experienced by the excitement felt by buying a product, leaving its imprint as a smile on a customer’s face and, for the vendors, by the mysterious passage of time. Using the energy metaphor, in these transactions, the potential, ‘pre-buzz’ energy is released as objects become commodities, and it is this energy that ‘fuels’ the experienced buzz. Going backwards from the moment of buzz, different sets of relations come together to produce it. For instance, social relations between customers, vendors and objects each contributes to the production of the market. Customers come together to buy commodities; vendors work to produce the market where customers can do so; and ultimately both customers and vendors engage with the commodity performing their roles as market users as well as performing the qualities of the commodity itself (Fig.  5.4). The events leading to the market’s buzz, however, do not emerge solely through the different configurations of the market’s social-­ materiality. Sensuous experience contributes as well. Borough Market stimulates the senses producing excitement as if the place itself is storing up ‘energy’. This excitement stems from the sensory spaces, the sensescapes, of the market that combine to bewilder market users, leading to energy that contributes the market’s sociality and ultimately to its buzz. The availability of sensory experiences provides a backdrop, similar to the

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Fig. 5.4  Fueling the spectacle

semiotics of the built environment, where the material-social relations may be variously assembled and engaged. Geographically, the effects are profound. The perceived disappearance of time suggests that while the event is just that, a moment of transaction where commodities are transformed, energy is released, money is made, all in an instant, the buzz is a string of events ‘riding’ on a wave of released energy. In the process a (commodity) space is formed, delineated by these discrete points of action. The result is (the perception of) time annihilated by the production of commodity space. When no transactions are occurring, however, the effects are the opposite. The (perception) of time is apparent, and it seems to pass more slowly. Similarly, the market ‘feels’ listless and ‘dead’. And, the feeling sometimes persists even when the market is crowded, suggesting that the components that make the buzz so perceptible are incomplete and that the social-­ material relations are wrongly assembled. Evaluation of the lack of buzz is speculative, however, given that the buzz only seems noticeable in

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retrospect, but it seems to reason that if objects are not being transformed and energy is not produced or released, then the buzz never comes to be. Curiously, it is the effects of this lack of buzz that is most noticeable. Fatigued-looking vendors, who appear ‘drawn-out’, and bored-looking consumers suggest that collectively they are not all that interested in making the market happen, implying that the lack of buzz somehow centres on sociality (or lack thereof). There are times, however, that the market itself feels tired, washed up or burned out. Vendors are tacitly aware of these dynamics. And more than once it has been suggested that ‘its’ not like it was, all of the old traders are gone [list of names]...now we vendors feel that Borough Market has become a zoo, and we’re the animals in the cages...but zoos charge money’. Another remarks that ‘other tourist attractions charge money for entrance, maybe Borough Market should too’. Such sentiments are reproduced: ‘there’s talk now of charging a small entrance fee, refundable with a purchase, like validating parking.’ Thinning meanings has been used to describe hyper-modernity, placelessness and inauthentic places (for instance, see: Relph 1976a, b; Featherstone 1991; Sack 1992, 1997; Augé 1995; Arefi 1999; Goss 1999), and though this may be true to some extent at Borough Market, as those in the market seek a more commercialized format, it is also just as likely that the thinning of meaning is dependent on perspective (Fig. 5.5). The fading buzz of the market indicates that a new one with new configurations of social-material relations will emerge. Borough Market’s popularity transformed it into an event itself. Its buzz is distinct from that on which the market depends. This suggests that as the market’s core customers, those who ascribe it with particular meanings about food or consumption, abandon it, new users contribute different sets of practices that generate different meanings. Over time the market’s meanings shift. The ‘old’ meanings that made Borough Market work as a market thin out and are replaced by new, different meanings that transform the very makeup of Borough Market. Changing meanings result from continual processes of culture, suggesting that it will never be like it was because ‘like it was’ can never be fixed in time. The implications are that ‘the buzz’ of the market depends on the trajectories and coordinates of its constituent relations. As these relations change, the buzz changes. Borough Market, after all, is a place, and places change.

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Fig. 5.5  Consuming the buzz

Conclusions: The Fuel of an Economy This chapter illustrates how buzz is the result of place and place-making in the marketplaces. It argues that although central to a range of economic practices for the market’s reproduction, buzz is neither a commodity nor can it be commoditized. Rather, it emerges from the interplay of material-­ semiotic and social-sensual practices. Further, it argues that the buzz of such places is infectious, emanating across place, distorting space and time. By making these arguments, this chapter addresses important questions about how buzz and other ephemera are generated from place and place-­ making. Its specific topo/graphic focus on a buzzy marketplace demonstrates how its ‘formations’ and ‘deformations’ (Anderson 2012: 79) materialize within the geographical contingency of a place. More explicitly, it demonstrates the ways in which such affects are generated through the embodied materiality, sociality and sensuality of place(s), leading to the reproduction of place and the marketplace as well as the market. In

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doing so, it illustrates how the often ephemeral and abstract relations and flows of capital and economies are indeed grounded in the assembly and reproduction of particular relations in the marketplace, and how fickle their organization and subsequent success ultimately is. Perhaps more significantly, this chapter begins to reframe the normative assumptions through which economies are often conceptualized. Its focus on the coalescence and critical mass of materiality, sociality and sensuality illustrates the ways in which buzz emerges from the boundedness place to become the fuel for its regeneration (Malpas 2008, 2012). In the next and final chapter, I take this notion further to illustrate the ways in Borough Market’s buzz, in whatever emergent form it takes and emanates from the marketplace, giving it and the market the capacity to knit together other places and geographies. Instead of assuming that buzzes, economies or markets somehow touch down in the milieu of the city (Thrift 2008a, b,; Katz 2001), this emergent spatiality instead illustrates how they emanate from places within it.

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Waskul, D.  D., Vannini, P., & Wilson, J. (2009). The aroma of recollection: Olfaction, nostalgia, and the shaping of the sensuous self. The Senses and Society, 4(1), 5–22. Watson, S. (2009). The magic of the marketplace: Sociality in a neglected public space. Urban Studies, 46(8), 1577–1591. Watson, S. (2013). City publics: The (dis)enchantments of urban encounters. London: Routledge. Wilson, H., & Darling, J. (2016). The possibilities of encounter (pp. 1–24). New York: Routledge. Worster, D. (1988). The wealth of nature: Environmental history and the ecological imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Wright, A. (1990). The death of Ramon Gonzalez: The modern agricultural dilema. Austin: University of Texas Press. Zaloom, C. (2006). Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 6

Assembling the Marketplace

Abstract  By way of conclusions, this chapter reassembles the marketplace. It argues that it is essential for geographers to revisit place and place-making, which has often been overlooked in recent geographical literatures—particularly in those associated with urban markets. Focusing particularly on notions vibrancy, conviviality and buzz, it argues that with wider social, cultural and political shifts within the urban landscape, it is critical to understand the roles that particular places like marketplaces play in generating these ephemera—especially as they occupy prominent positions within academic, lay and policy-debate. Drawing conclusions, the chapter also summarizes the central contributions of the book, explores the potential for topo/graphy as a mode of place-based analysis for marketplaces and beyond, and highlights potential avenues further work. Keywords  Buzz • Topo/raphy • Markets • Marketplaces • Place-­ fetish • Place

Buzzing Marketplace The buzzy district around London Bridge and London’s Borough Market (the UK), is renowned for its food and foodie culture, and, more recently, for a vibrant nighttime economy that revolves around its restaurants and bars that emerged as a result of this culture (Coles and Crang 2011). Indeed, media coverage surrounding a terrorist attack that struck the area © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Coles, Making Markets Making Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72865-6_6

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on the 3rd of June 2017 tended to concentrate on Borough Market and London Bridge as sites of consumption. Not only did it focus its outrage on the violence but specifically on the ways its violence targeted a supposedly British, particularly London, way of life—one that revolves around freedom of choice and expression, but also the freedom to consume. One commentator, The Independent’s Economics Editor Ben Chu, goes into greater depth. He discusses why sites such as Borough Market, and global cities more widely, are so popular, and thus seem to attract the attention of terrorists. Steeped in the language of urban economic geography, Chu suggests that the ‘city’s foodie hub is a powerful case-study in the phenomenon of retail clustering’. He goes on to discuss the ways in which ‘centripetal force generates the necessary footfall’ to make such spaces like Borough Market viable, and notes that ‘clustering, economies of agglomeration, network effects and positive spill-overs, on a larger scale, explain [‘global’] cities themselves’ (see Scott and Storper 2015; Sassen 2013). Chu concludes by evoking former New York Mayor Rudi Guiliani’s message to New Yorkers to ‘go buy a pizza’ after the September 11th 2001 World Trade Centre attacks, and suggest that the message to Londoners should ‘go to Borough Market’. This media coverage implies a sense of permanence around the marketplace—that unless outside events intervene, Borough Market, its buzz and consequent consumer culture have and will always be present. Missing, of course, is that it is only within the last 15 years or so that the area around London Bridge and Borough Market has been a buzzy district at all. Despite its proximity to the City of London, which is a few hundred metres away across the river over London Bridge, Saturday night around Borough Market used to be nearly deserted, with the exception of a few pubs catering to a now displaced local population, and a couple of nightclubs located in proximate railway viaducts. As detailed in previous chapters, Borough Market’s establishment as foodie hub began in the late 1990s when a buzz emerged around the marketplace. Subsequently it, and other key sites along London’s Southbank, emerged as an anchor and focal point for consumer culture and cultural economy in the Borough of Southwark and for London. As I have argued in this book, how Borough Market became buzzy revolves entirely around how buzz is generated through place and place-making in Borough Market itself. And, this returns us to Probyn’s (2011) provocation about the relationship between ‘market’ and market‘place’ that animates this book from the beginning.

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To recap, Borough Market, like other marketplaces, are sites where the exchange values of commodities are established, negotiated and exchanged. In Borough Market in particular, these values bear some relationship to the materiality of the object in that they are derived from meanings that point towards imagined geographies and representations of places where objects are produced, and that they also physically come from these places. Yet, because these same meanings are generated by place-making and reproduced through consumption within the marketplace, the values they engender are ultimately only associable with enabling exchange—making them only about reproducing the market. Place and the marketplace are deployed as tools to achieve these ends. This lends place and marketplace fetishistic qualities that obscure not only the material geographies of the commodities that comprise the marketplace, but also the material, social, sensual and discursive interrelations of its reproduction. Buzz, and experiences of consumption from which it emerges, in turn feeds this fetish. To conclude this book, the rest of this chapter focuses on the social-spatial implications of buzz on the market and marketplace, and the place fetishes that hide them.

Buzzing Borough Market Borough Market’s buzz is most palpable in the early afternoon, just after the lunchtime crush that slows the transactions that define the market. The crowds have dissipated slightly, but the activity at the stalls is almost frenetic. Corridors are choked with heavily laden buyers making their way through the market hall to make more purchase, to leave, or to head to the numerous cafes, pubs, bars and restaurants that have sprung up in Borough Market’s wake (Fig. 6.1). Handing cash, and more recently cards, over countertops, customers shout orders to traders, and traders respond by handing packaged goods back over. The groundwork for convivial sociality is laid over time and in periods when the marketplace is less busy, and when vendors have time to talk. Though still present, the social transactions between vendor and customer is brisker, and often drowned out by the polyphony of senses that wash over the marketplace and transforms it into a blurry synesthesia (Shaw 2017). It is as if all of the work of making the marketplace—the material-semiotics, the commodity negotiations, the convivial social-­ sensuality—culminates into these moments of trading.

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Fig. 6.1  Positive spillover effects

Despite the frantic action all across the marketplace floor, however, this is when the relations of the market are also most laid bare. Careful attention reveals a marketplace reduced to its exchange relations. As sales are rung up, Borough Market’s material-semiotics, and its social-sensuality, even time itself vanishes into the space of exchange. This period generates the largest profits, and vendors report the largest sums of money (relatively speaking) changing hands. As the clock tips towards 1600, Borough Market’s nominal Saturday closing hour, the pace of trade increases. Fishmongers, bread sellers and others whose stocks will not last until the next trading day begin to make deals. As a rule, vendors want to avoid this, but all food is perishable, and fish and bread happen to be the least durable. Prices drop. When trading stops for the day in Borough Market, a sense of relief falls across the marketplace as the pent-up, buzzy energy of trading emanates to nearby bars and restaurants, before dissipating into the night.

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Vendors are keenly aware of this buzz, and most know that it cannot be actively produced, suggesting instead that it is a wave that can be ridden. This does not mean that vendors are not savvy to buzz’s constituent components. They are indeed reticent to make any changes to the fabric of the marketplace, such as when management, worried about crowds of tourists not buying anything, began discussions of charging entry fees. Such apprehensions are perhaps one reason for the marketplace’s claims to alterity; individual stalls share a common aesthetic across the market hall. Working hard to develop the interplay between material-semiotics and the social-sensuality of their stalls, but also the marketplace itself, vendors are only too aware of the buzz and how their profits depend on the critical mass of people, things and ideas of the marketplace that generates it. The notion of critical mass provides insight into how buzz emerges and later emanates from the marketplace as it ostensibly shuts. Only on ‘good days’ do vendors and customers alike decamp to nearby pubs, bars and restaurants. As well as philosophical connections, many of these in fact have direct business connections to the marketplace itself, through complex leasehold agreements or material relations in terms of produce, as well as through semiotic connections as nearby bars and restaurants seek to capitalize on the sense of place, provenance and geography developed within Borough Market, and its buzz, as it emanates outward. On ‘bad days’, even when the market hall is teaming with crowds, when there is no buzz in the marketplace and vendors cut their losses, the bars and restaurants are also quiet. It is tempting to lay Borough Market’s buzz solely on food’s embodied, visceral and affective force (Probyn 1999; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-­ Conroy 2008; Carolan 2011). After all, colloquially speaking, buzz refers to the effects and affects that particular materialities of the marketplace, such as caffeine and alcohol, or fatty and sugar-rich foods, have on the body. In Borough Market, not only do bodies consume the marketplace’s meanings and materialites, and socialities and sensualities. Through its foods, bodies ingest them, generating a buzzy body and reproducing the market through their own corporeal reproduction. Mintz’s (1985) analysis of sugar makes exactly this point (as do I in Chap. 2 of this book): that the values of commodities, be they use or exchange, are manipulated through the market in service of its reproduction. Borough Market’s reproduction, however, depends on not only the buying and consumption of its commodities, but the consumption of the buzz that buying and selling engenders. Focusing solely on the

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consumption of commodities as food, the body and these vital and visceral materialities overlook the interplay between the material-semiotic and the social-sensuality of the marketplace. Likewise, focusing solely on Borough Market’s spectacle and performance overemphasizes the role of the visual in the sensoria of place and the marketplace. Place, as Casey (1996: 22) reminds us, ‘has its own “operative intentionality” that elicits and responds to the corporeal intentionality of the perceiving subject. Thus place integrates with body as much as body with place’ (quotation marks original) (Casey 1996: 22). That Borough Market is a marketplace for food simply makes this interplay more profound. Though marketplaces have long constituted sites in which abstract economic relations are embedded in everyday (economic) practices (Laueremann 2012), urban marketplaces, like Borough Market, are no longer just ‘tightly defined temporal and spatial frame[s] for the exchange and physical redistribution of goods’ (Lyon 2016: 1). Similar to the ways in which new practices and technologies have altered financial markets (Borch et  al. 2015; Schatzki 2002), structural changes to the physical exchange and (re)distribution of goods, particularly foodstuffs, as well as shifting modes of retail provisioning have tended to displace the function of marketplaces from the urban core. London’s remaining wholesale food markets (e.g. Billingsgate fish market, ‘New’ Covent Garden fruit, vegetable and flower market, or ‘New’ Spitalfields Market), for instance, have long since moved to locations on its periphery—mirroring an earlier urban geography of marketplaces in which the messiness of market-processes were displaced to the urban periphery. Yet, as visible within Borough Market the materiality of marketplaces— their built environments and the meanings they represent—remains in situ. No longer valued for their capacity to generate economic exchange alone, they are associated instead with a ‘rediscovery of the urbane’, viewed as ‘fixtures in the urban landscape and more salient in discussions about where to live and work’ (Silver and Clark 2013: 9). Such marketplaces have been repackaged as ‘cultural artefacts’, transformed as ‘competitive assets’ for cities (Miles 2012: 221) and, consequently, revalued for the consumer culture they simultaneously engender and generate. Drawing from their site and situation in cities, marketplace managers consequently (re)write the histories and geographies of marketplaces to legitimate their new position(s) as buzz producers, and to resist other powerful forces that might seek to capitalize on their often high rent-values.

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Marketplaces like Borough Market might remain sites of encounter, or ‘contact zones’, where bodies rub together to enact the convivial cosmopolitanism of urban life (Anderson 2011). However, they become less identifiable as places that fulfil everyday social and economic needs or transgress and destabilize social and cultural norms. Rather, they are fetishized as what management consultants might refer to as a buzzing, consumption-orientated ‘experience’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999). After all, the experiences of consumption and the buzz of Borough Market, and no doubt other marketplaces, have all but replaced the old wholesale market. Defined through multiple articulations, buzz is indeed associated with particular types of places—namely, those of particular types of consumption. As the relationship between such places and buzz is increasingly recognized for the supposed benefits they bring to an urban economy, places are increasingly fetishized and positioned as key features of the urban landscape. Regardless of how it is consumed, and its wider capacity to generate economic spillover effects, Borough Market’s buzz represents the culmination of its material-semiotic and its social-sensuality, materialized affectively into the social body of the marketplace, but insofar as it fuels the exchange relations that make the marketplace a market. Buzz in this case encapsulates the embodied experiences of being in and part of place (Longhurst et al. 2009)—the experiences of how people interact with its material-semiotic and the social-sensuality—all whilst making and remaking the marketplace. The importance of these experiences with and within the marketplace is that they are simultaneously individual and social. As with affective atmospheres, Borough Market’s buzz envelopes the marketplace (Anderson and Wyle 2009); it is ‘impersonal in that [it] belong[s] to collective situations and yet can be felt as intensely personal…[emanating] from the assembling of the human bodies, discursive bodies, non-human bodies, and all the other bodies’ (Anderson 2012 : 80). This makes buzz ‘distributed yet palpable …[a] quality of environmental immersion that registers in and through sensing bodies’ (McCormack 2008: 413). To illustrate this point, I return to the interplay between Borough Market’s material-semiotic and its social-sensuality, the interplay that generates buzz. At the same time, it contributes to a crowding and congestion within the marketplace that inhibits the circulation and flow on which Borough Market as a market depends, and threatens to stifle the very interactions and encounters that make and reproduce the marketplace. Some days, customers tell me, ‘it’s too crowded to do any shopping’, and

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vendors complain that these crowds impede trade. Borough Market is physically constrained by its built environment. Too many people in such confinement make it difficult to move around and make it hard to engage with the social-sensuality of marketplace—other than perhaps as a claustrophobic experience that confounds Borough Market’s buzz. The sensory milieu, the crowds, the chaos of the market are thus a mixed blessing for the market’s social and economic reproduction. It is so loud in the market hall that everyone has to shout to be heard. Sporadic collisions with other market-goers distract from vendors’ narratives. Supposedly subtle flavours and nuances of food are often lost because of all of the other smells that waft through the market hall. Sometimes-­ charming drips and fecundity that differentiate Borough Market from more normalized consumption outlets are at other times just dirt (Douglas 1966). On these occasions, simply being in the marketplace is unpleasant. Nearly all of the vendors I have chatted with and interviewed resent the crowds at some point. ‘Lookers only come here for the samples… they’re not really interested in the product, in learning, [or] in us really.’ ‘They get in the way…they don’t buy.’ Some go so far as to blame the Borough Market’s built environment. ‘If you look at markets in France, they’re organized in rows. It’s easy to get around and buy stuff. Here people can’t even get to the tills.’ Likewise, most of the ‘regular’ customers I have spoken with tend to agree. ‘Tourists are in the way.’ ‘They’ve spoilt the market.’ ‘They’re in the way’; ‘I wish they’d fuck-off home.’ Usually coming once a month, and always right when the marketplace opens, these customers report that because of congestion, using Borough Market daily is so time consuming that it is impossible. A dynamic between fixity and fluidity defines the marketplace. If bodies and their capital flow too quickly through Borough Market, it fails to reach a critical mass; it fails to buzz, and, consequently, it fails to reproduce itself. Likewise, however, if, owing to the crowds, no one can get through the narrow passages, or get to vendors to engage in exchange, then, likewise, the market stagnates and fails. Borough Market’s reproduction relies on the right amount of ‘stickiness’ that enables its constituent relations to come together at the right time and in the right way, fomenting the marketplace’s buzz, making the marketplace and generating the market.

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Spatial Implications The relationship(s) and tensions between fixity and fluidity of the market ultimately come down to that between competing visions for place and space. Noted previously, however, recent social-spatial discourse typically privilege mobility and relationality (Jessop, Brenner and Jones 2008). The result is that markets, economies and, by extension, marketplaces are envisioned through the flattening tendency of an ontology (see Escobar 2007) that fixates on ‘transcalar and nonlinear connections…that cannot be territorially attributed to any measure of certainty or fixity’ (Amin and Cohendet 2004: 93). Such positioning cements a perception that markets and economies are located within spaces defined by circuits, flows and networks (see Hudson 1999; Amin 2004; French et al. 2009). Movement through such space appears to be unimpeded, whilst power relations emanate across it (Allen 2016)—only touching down when they inscribe particular locales (e.g. places) with meaning (Katz 2001). This spatial logic, likewise noted earlier in this book, overlooks the dynamics of place and place-making as the foundation for fashioning such relations. The significance of such an omission goes beyond esoteric philosophic arguments about the nature of spatiality to encompass any number of material practices that lie at the heart of contemporary late-market capitalism. The suggestion that place and all the complexities of its reproduction is somehow subordinate to space generates a discourse in which individual places no longer matter to the produced spaces of the economy. Returning to Malpas (2008, 2012), he insists on the mutuality of place and space, that ‘space is opened up through the happening of place’ (2008: 260); that ‘space gives room for the multiplicity of places to emerge within it; (pg. 262); that ‘space and place thus stand in an essential relation to one another—albeit a relation that cannot be given any simple or unequivocal characterization’ (pg. 263). Reproducing a discourse in which place serves place, however, has multiple implications. Repeated often enough, such a discourse leads to conditions and practices in which particular places appear to no longer matter. Thus, they become erasable, and indeed are erased by the spectres that seem to inhabit relational space. Late capitalism is littered with such places. Their geographies are told as part of a rich, albeit harrowing, compendium of places obliterated by capital’s uneven spatial reproduction. Scalar traps (see Brown and Purcell 2005), however, are at play when places are viewed solely as the recipient of such relational spaces. Displacing

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culpability to distant agents acting from the space of the global, and, to draw from a point made by Malpas (2012), relying on an unhelpfully ambiguous language of circulations and flows, on the one hand ignores the places from which such agents act. On the other hand, the same ambiguously defined spatiality ignores the complicity of local agency in reflecting and reproducing such ‘global’ machinations (Lauermann 2013). If indeed place-making is a moral project, and the capacity to do good is dependent on whether and how well places enable geographical awareness (see Sack 2003), then addressing such global agency rests on the capacity to challenge and contest the places in which it is founded and their capacity to foster awareness as their relations extend outward to other places. Treating market processes—whereby exchange values are disassociated from the materiality of objects—as place processes subjects them to scrutiny on moral geographical grounds. Locating them in place enables the interrogation of their generative relations as they extend outward. Indeed, the vision for a political-economic spatiality that overlooks the specificity of place where such relationality is unavoidably generated is dangerously fetishistic, because it hides the embedded, day-to-day, social, material and discursive practices whereby such places and their market-processes occur.

Place-Fetish This book’s  topo/graphy (re)grounds the place-fetish into the ways in which the constituent relations of place are folded and woven together. Moreover, it highlights how buzz emerges through the interplay between the marketplace’s material-semiotic and social-sensuality. In locating buzz concomitantly within the reproduction of place, the topo/graphy illustrates the ways in which buzz becomes a kind of force that gathers the relations of the marketplace, holds them together and fuels its reproduction, and also signals the ways in which such buzzes might emanate from the marketplace to envelope other places and fold them into it buzzy space. Excavating the co-constituent relationships between buzz and place, however, has further implications. First, it shows that buzz is an ephemeral but essential component to place. And, although some places, like Borough Market, are dependent on buzz and their capacity to generate buzz, buzz itself resists attempts at active reproduction. Instead, it remains emergent, unruly and subject to a critical mass of elements that may or may not assemble or circulate within place.

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By empirically demonstrating the simultaneity of place and space, this topo/graphy illustrates the ways in which buzz emerges from the boundedness and extendedness of place, emanating outward and unfolding into a space that enrols other places into its reproduction (Malpas 2008, 2012). Thus, rather than assuming that buzzes somehow swirl within the milieu, maelstrom of the city (Thrift 2005), this book shows instead how they emanate from places within cities, making buzzy places the sites around which such vortexes churn (Freund and Padayachee 2002). Building from this point this book’s use of topo/graphy and its sustained conceptual, methodological and empirical engagement with place pushes back against the upscaling of urban phenomena to suggest instead that urban processes, often seen as global or relational, are indeed place-processes enacted by and within place and the practices that constitute place. The materialities that comprise Borough Market, for instance the commodities, as well as the elements of its material culture and built environment draw together a densely interconnected network (e.g. a topology) of relations, processes, experiences and knowledges that define Borough Market’s spatial extent on a larger scale than that of its presence in place (Massey 1994). Lake District meat connects Borough Market to Cumbria and the Lake District, Comte cheese to the Jura and so on. The built environment connects Borough Market to a nostalgic Old London, extending the marketplace temporally and imaginatively. At the same time, connecting Borough Market to meanings surrounding ‘good food’ (Sage 2003), and to its imaged landscapes of bucolic rurality, extends the marketplace topologically through imaginations and imagined geographies. Borough Market’s social relations likewise establish its topology. People arrive to the marketplace, and leave again—often with a day’s shopping. They too co-constitute the market-space, extending it beyond its locale. Folding (imagined) places, spaces, temporalities and their relations back into the marketplace, these relations of the marketplace extend it across space and time. Tracing them out reveals the topologies that delineate the openness of market-space. As important as it is that these relations reach out, but also flow into the marketplace, it is that they are gathered, assembled and woven together on the trading floor. Borough Market’s material-semiotic is woven together from the meanings and materialities surrounding the proxy and proximate geographical processes, and slippages of meaning that transform foodstuffs and their meanings into commodities. Likewise, Borough Market’s social-sensuality—its buzz—emerges as buyers and sellers

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interact with each other through and because of the material-semiotic. Individually, such sensuous experiences become a platform for the separate transactions that comprise economic exchange in the marketplace. Taken together, they enhance meanings and embed social relations into Borough Market, establishing a critical density of relations from which the marketplace’s buzz emerges. This buzz provides an energy that reproduces Borough Market. Interrogating these assembled relations and their effects reveals the topographies that demarcate the boundaries of marketplace, but also the topologies that enable the marketplace and market to reach out, unfolding into a market-space.

Conclusions Leaving the Marketplace The topo/graphy of Borough Market presented in this book thus illustrates the reproduction of a marketplace through its topographical and topological assembly. Particularly, the topo/graphy illustrates how market processes—the buying and selling of goods—as well as the relational spatiality of markets and economies more widely, are place-processes, embedded in the rich material-semiotics and social-sensual buzzes of marketplaces. As it fashions its topo/graphy of the marketplace, this book thus grounds the negotiations, relations and conventions of economic exchange into the materiality, sociality and sensuality that reproduces the marketplace— thereby showing how ‘real’ markets emerge from real places and real practices (Berndt and Boeckler 2009; Jones and Murphy 2010). In doing so, it binds the abstract relations and flows of markets and economies described by market-space into the day-to-day reproduction of a marketplace. Conceptually, as well as empirically speaking, this book and its topo/ graphy therefore demonstrates how the spaces of relational flows that constitute economies and markets (Amin 2004)—market-space (Bestor 2004)—unfold from their assembly, embeddedness and boundedness within the market-place (Malpas 2008). Illustrating this relationship between place and space underscores how the hegemony of a world seemingly comprised of unceasing relations and flows can be disrupted by radical as well as mundane actions in place. The wider significance that this topo/graphical excavation of the marketplace presents is a clearer ontological understanding of the relationship between (market) space and (market) place. Bringing together two hitherto distinct ways of conceptualizing the relationship between space and place, the topologic and topographic, shows how place and space emerge from their interplay.

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Index1

A Acting/act, 32, 37, 38, 38n2, 60, 70, 80, 109, 110, 112, 116–118, 123, 124, 129, 148 Actor Network Theory (ANT), 6, 50, 51 Affect/affective, 59, 86, 108, 122, 126, 133, 143, 145 atmospheres, 108, 145 Agriculture, 27, 28, 30, 66, 67, 86, 96 Alterity, 36, 37, 39, 48, 50, 111, 143 Anxiety, 40, 59, 66, 67 Arcade, 36, 53, 55–57 Arcades Project, 53, 55–57 Architecture, 17, 50, 55, 107 Artisanal, 38n3, 63, 65, 69–71 Assembly, 12–14, 17, 30, 31, 52, 63, 134, 150 relational assembly, 13

Atmosphere, 108, 120, 121, 145 Authentic/authentication/ authenticity, 39, 41, 60, 61, 63, 68, 86, 113, 121 B Benjamin, Walter, 56 Bestor, Theodor, 4, 6, 10, 17, 78, 150 Bodies, 3, 8, 9, 11, 14, 31, 49, 64, 107, 109, 118, 119, 123, 124, 129, 130, 143–146 Borough High Street, 37 Built environment, 17, 49, 50, 53–58, 60, 63, 71, 72, 95, 107, 118, 131, 144, 146, 149 Buzz/buzziness, 4, 8, 18, 73, 105–134, 140–146, 148–150 relations of buzz, 132

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Coles, Making Markets Making Place, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72865-6

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156 

INDEX

Buzzing bodies, 3, 109, 129, 143 market, 4, 18, 105–134, 140–146, 148, 150 places, 108, 141, 145, 148, 149 spaces, 148 C Capital, 3–6, 9, 12, 13, 31, 32, 37–39, 80, 81, 113, 116, 127, 134, 146, 147 Capitalism, 2, 3, 11, 14, 29, 30, 32, 40, 41, 56, 66, 108, 128, 147 agri-capitalism, 26, 28–32, 34, 35, 40–42, 48, 72 Chorleywood Bread Process (CBP), 26, 27, 31 Circuits, 147 Cluster/clustering, 140 Commodity/ies commodity culture, 4, 15, 78–101, 107 commodity displacement, 52 commodity fetishism, 13, 14, 33 commodity market, 48, 61, 68–69, 79–82 commodity space, 86, 121, 131 commodity transaction, 3, 12, 18, 32, 36, 51, 115, 120, 122, 125, 126, 130 consumption, 40, 42, 50, 56, 59, 101, 109, 115, 126, 143, 144 cultures of, 112 Community, 110 Consumer, 15, 16, 28, 31, 33, 34, 36, 39, 48, 49, 52, 57, 58, 61, 66–68, 70–73, 81, 83–88, 91, 95, 96, 98, 99, 109–113, 116, 120, 123, 124, 127, 132, 140, 144 Consumption, 7, 13, 16–18, 26, 32, 34–36, 39, 40, 42, 49, 50, 52, 56, 57, 59, 70, 71, 73, 78, 83n5,

86, 91, 95, 96, 101, 107–109, 111, 112, 115–124, 126, 132, 140, 141, 143–146 Contact zone, 7, 145 Conventions, 3, 4, 38, 48, 125, 150 Theories of, 85 Convivial cosmopolitanism, 145 Conviviality, 18, 105–134 Cosmopolitan(ism), 7, 108 Craft, 91–93, 96 Crang, Philip, 33, 49, 52, 96, 107, 139 Critical mass, 126–129, 134, 143, 146, 148 D Didactic, 124 Discourse, 4, 8, 9, 12, 34, 37, 39, 40, 48, 50, 51, 54, 65, 67, 68, 78, 83–86, 92, 93, 97, 98, 108, 112, 116, 117, 124, 127, 147 Discovery, 85–91, 95, 97, 123 Disgust, 122 Double commodity fetish/fetishism, 33, 96, 101 E Economy cultural economy, 16, 36, 73, 108, 140 political economy, 26–28, 38 of quality, 49, 65, 82, 101, 121 of signs, 68, 111 (see also Sign-economy) visual economy, 118, 119, 122 Emanations/emanate, 5, 26, 29, 134, 142, 143, 147, 149 Embodiment, 11, 18, 72, 129 Energy, 29, 126, 128–132, 142, 150 Entanglements, 108 Ephemeral, 4, 134, 148

 INDEX 

Ethical consumption, 83n5 food, 35 Ethics of consumption, 35 of production, 35, 79, 83 Exchange, 3, 7, 8, 10, 12, 17, 18, 27, 32, 33, 36, 40, 41, 49–52, 68, 72, 73, 78, 88, 89, 91, 98, 108, 111, 112, 116, 129, 141–146, 150 Experience, 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18, 35, 36, 39, 40, 42, 48, 56, 57, 61, 66, 73, 85, 92, 93, 97–101, 108–113, 115–122, 124–126, 130, 141, 145, 146, 149, 150 Experience economy, 60 F Face-to-face (F2F), 108, 125 Fair, 84, 85, 122 Fair Trade, 48, 83n4, 84 Fetish, 3, 11, 14, 68, 124, 141 place-fetish, 14, 141, 148–150 See also Commodity/ies, commodity fetishism; Double commodity fetish/fetishism Fetishized, 10, 11, 50, 145 Fiction, 33 Fixity and fluidity, 146, 147 Folk-devil, 67 Following, 14, 17, 26, 53, 78, 92, 113 Follow the thing, 17, 78 Foodie, 37, 39, 54, 112, 113, 140 Food panic/scare/crisis, 29, 39, 66 Food provision, 16, 26, 27, 29, 34–37, 39, 41, 48, 54, 60, 65, 70, 72, 86, 112, 121, 122 Fresh, 65, 66, 117–120, 122 Fuel, 18, 31, 73, 108, 129, 130, 133–134, 145, 148

157

G Gaze, 67, 68, 71, 119 Geographical knowledges, 49, 91 lores, 37, 60, 62 narratives, 41, 59 See also Geographical imagination vs. imagined Geographical imagination, 33, 35 Geography/geographies, 10, 12, 17, 18, 33–36, 41, 48–69, 78, 90, 91, 96, 98, 107, 109, 110, 115, 116, 123, 125–134, 140, 141, 143, 144, 147, 149 Ghost, 123 Global capitalism circulations of, 108 flows of, 108 See also Capitalism Good food, 37, 66, 69, 70, 149 Goss, Jon, 10, 13, 39, 58, 61, 71, 132 H Heritage, 49, 54, 58–60, 65, 68, 71, 72, 86, 95, 107 History vs. heritage, 60, 68, 71 I Image, 8, 11, 12, 32, 35, 40, 52, 60, 62, 65, 67–71, 96, 98, 110, 116, 118, 119 Imagined geography, 48–73 Imagination, 8, 11, 13, 17, 27, 28, 33–35, 40, 41, 49, 56, 60–63, 65–73, 107, 115, 116, 119, 149 Indexical, 61 Industrial, 15, 26, 63, 71, 127, 129

158 

INDEX

J Jackson, Peter, 29, 39, 66, 113 K Knowledge(s), 4–6, 8, 10, 49, 50, 52, 54, 81, 83, 85, 87, 88, 91, 94–98, 108, 110, 112, 149 L Leaky/leakiness, 61, 70, 118, 120 space, 70, 72, 116–124 London, 2, 4, 15, 26, 28, 36–38, 38n3, 54, 56–58, 60, 71, 78, 90, 92, 106, 107, 139, 140, 144 M Maffesoli, Michel, 18, 108, 109, 112, 116, 125, 126 Magic, 10 magic number, 116 Malpas, Jeff, 4–6, 9, 12, 13, 29, 134, 147–150 Market-place, 2–18, 26–42, 48–69, 78, 106–134, 139–150 Market-space, 4, 6, 10, 12, 17, 78, 149, 150 Marx, Karl, 3, 10, 14 Material culture of display, 17, 35, 49, 50, 58, 65 of material culture, 58–68, 107 visual material culture, 35, 49, 50, 65, 72, 111, 117, 118 Materiality, 4, 8, 10–13, 17, 33–35, 39–41, 48–69, 78, 80, 85, 91, 95, 107, 108, 117–119, 123, 125, 129, 133, 134, 141, 143, 144, 148–150 Material-semiotic, 17, 18, 40–42, 50–53, 54n2, 58, 61, 63, 70–73,

107, 108, 117, 120, 124, 133, 141–145, 148–150 Mcnally, David, 3, 11 Messiness, 144 Mintz, Sydney, 129, 143 Modern, 29, 56 Modernity, 34, 56, 116 hyper-modernity, 132 Money, 38, 48, 51, 111, 123, 130–132, 142 N Narrative, 13, 33, 39, 41, 59, 65, 67, 79, 83, 83n4, 86, 95–98, 115, 146 Nature, 5, 9, 12, 30, 34, 39, 40, 84–86, 93–95, 101, 123, 147 nature vs. science, 94 Network, 30, 34, 48, 70, 79, 83, 85, 88, 98, 99, 140, 147, 149 Night-time economy, 139 Nostalgia, 61, 70, 121 P Past, 54, 60–63, 121 Performance, 70, 101, 110, 111, 113, 115, 118, 124, 144 of quality, 124 See also Acting/act Place, 2–18, 26, 28–30, 32–37, 39–42, 48–61, 63, 64, 66–72, 78, 83, 85–87, 91, 93, 95–98, 100, 101, 107–110, 112–125, 129, 130, 132–134, 140, 141, 144, 145, 147–150 sense of place, 66, 71, 117, 124, 143 Placeless food/foodscape, 27, 29, 31, 32, 34, 38, 41, 66, 71, 110

 INDEX 

Placeless(ness), 29, 32, 40, 42, 66, 71, 132 Place-making, 4, 5, 9, 12–15, 18, 36, 52, 94, 133, 140, 141, 147, 148 Probyn, Elspeth, 4, 7, 12, 36, 140, 143 Producer, 28, 34, 48, 49, 66, 68, 71, 72, 79, 83, 84, 87, 88, 97, 107, 112, 113, 115, 128, 144 Provenance, 17, 32, 33, 39, 78, 121, 143 Proximity, 49, 52, 65, 67, 70, 126, 140 Proxy, 10, 49, 96, 98, 149 Puissance, 18, 108, 109, 125, 126 Q Quality/qualities commoditizing, 89–95 discourses of quality, 48, 68, 78, 83, 84, 86, 98 narratives of quality, 83 R Relations discursive relations, 9, 10 material relations, 62, 112, 143 sensual relations, 4, 12 social relations, 3, 7, 12–14, 29, 30, 32, 40, 49, 108, 111, 113, 115, 125, 129, 130, 149, 150 Relations of regard/trust, 8, 66, 68, 85, 110, 111 Representation, 13, 14, 49, 62, 65, 71, 93, 101, 117, 119, 121, 141 Reproduce/reproduction of place, 13, 52, 148 social, 3, 4, 6, 12, 31, 126, 141, 146 of space, 6, 15, 112

159

Ritual, 87, 112, 115 Rubbing, 117 Ruins, 26, 29, 41 S Sack, Robert David, 4, 9–14, 132, 148 (S)cience, 64, 93, 94, 96 Semiotic, 12, 17, 32, 33, 40, 49–52, 54, 56, 62, 65, 68, 70–72, 95, 108, 131, 143 semiotic space, 65, 70, 71 Senses, 3, 9, 12–14, 18, 28, 30, 32, 35, 36, 39, 41, 48–50, 53, 57, 59, 60, 66, 68, 70, 71, 73, 84, 92, 95, 106, 108, 109, 111, 113, 116–118, 121–123, 126, 129, 130, 140–143 Sense-scape/sensorium, 10, 117, 119 Sensual/sensuality, 3, 4, 7–14, 18, 29, 36, 42, 107–109, 117, 118, 120, 123–126, 129, 133, 134, 141, 143, 150 social sensuality, 3, 7, 8, 12, 15, 17, 18, 40, 107, 141–146, 148, 149 Sights, 3, 90, 118–119 Signage, 17, 49, 53, 54, 59, 63, 65 Sign-economy, 68, 111 Signs, 49, 51, 61, 63, 65, 67–72, 122, 124 Slippages of meaning, 71, 149 Semiotic slippages, see Slippages of meaning Smells/smellscape, 3, 86, 107, 115, 117, 120–123, 129, 146 Sociality, 8, 11–13, 108, 109, 111–113, 116, 121, 124–126, 129, 130, 132–134, 141, 143, 150 Social milieu, 126 Social-spatial, 15, 28, 112, 141, 147

160 

INDEX

Sounds/soundscape, 3, 106, 117, 119–120, 123 Space, 3–7, 9–13, 15, 17, 29, 30, 32, 33, 36, 41, 49, 52, 58, 59, 61, 65, 70–73, 78, 80, 86, 89–91, 93–99, 101, 108, 109, 111, 112, 116–125, 128–131, 133, 140, 142, 147–150 Speciality coffee vs. specialist coffee, 78, 79, 83, 85 Spectre/spectral, 3, 11, 26, 32, 40, 147 Stall display, 17, 50, 58, 70, 107 Sterile, 14, 64, 65 Stoller, Paul, 13, 129 Supermarkets, 15, 26–28, 31, 33, 35, 37, 48, 57, 60, 65, 67, 71, 79n1, 112, 121, 122 T Taste/tasting, 3, 16, 31, 36, 37, 48, 79, 84–89, 91, 91n6, 92, 94–99, 107, 113, 115, 117, 123–124, 129 Taussig, Michael, 11, 13, 30 Terroir, 85–88, 92 Time, 3, 5, 10, 11, 13, 15, 27, 29–32, 34, 36, 38, 52, 56–60, 87, 91, 92, 97, 98, 115–117, 122, 127–133, 141, 142, 145, 146, 149 Topography/topo/graphy, 4, 5, 11–15, 18, 36, 148–150 counter-topography, 26, 32 topography vs. topology, 9, 13, 150 Totem, 112 Touch/tactile/haptic, 11, 32, 110, 122, 123, 129, 134 Tourist/tourism, 3, 15, 57, 112, 113, 125, 132, 143, 146

Transaction, 3, 12, 18, 32, 36, 51, 115, 116, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 130, 131, 141, 150 See also Commodity/ies, commodity transaction Transformation, 27, 61, 89–96, 101, 116, 130 Translate/translated/translating, 17, 34, 42, 77, 78, 95, 99, 116, 117 Tribe, 109, 112, 116 U Urban geography, 140, 144 landscape, 8, 18, 144, 145 V Value exchange-value, 3, 6, 10, 11, 29–32, 34, 41, 51, 72, 91, 95, 123, 130, 141, 148 negotiation, 6, 40, 68 use-value, 3, 27, 31, 32, 51, 52, 61, 91, 124 valueless, 91 Vibrancy, 18, 105–134 Visceral/viscerally, 49, 108, 110, 125, 143, 144 visceral entanglements, 108 Visual, 13, 17, 49, 50, 65, 70–72, 117–119, 122, 123, 129, 144 visualicity, 118 See also Economy; Material culture Vitality, 108, 125 Z Zaloom, Caitlin, 6, 8, 10, 70, 129