The salon below caught my eye because of the white printed sign in the window which reads 'POLSKA KOSMETYCZKA & FRYZJER' meaning Polish beautician and hairdresser. One of the marks of London's superdiversity is its polyvocality, the multitude of languages that make up the city's everyday landscape. Here it is used to announce to the Polish women of Lewisham that inside there is someone who will literally speak their language whilst doing their hair.
The window display of Kings and Queens Salon is dominated by adverts for Lycamobile providing cheap phone calls around the world (in this case to Nigeria). The salon also offers to 'send and receive money around the world [from] here' via the Western Union and 'global' money transfer via Sigue. In her 1994 work Space, Place and Gender, the geographer Doreen Massey calls for a consideration of 'a really global sense of place' in which we must think of the social relations 'that stretch beyond, tying any particularity into wider relations and processes in which other places are implicated too'. In the local, everyday space of this hair salon, global connections are made.
Thinking of the global connections that are present on our local high streets brings to mind Suzanne Hall's map in which she links the Walworth Road and the world through the origins of the independent shop owners:
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