Hanna Eriksson Södergren
Order and Dis-Order Within the London Food Landscape: Exploring the Street Party and Structures of Social Eating
Social eating in public space is a convivial action that has been limited in the modern London high street. This essay looks at an alternative social eating practice, the street party, and how its structure challenges the currently limiting ideals of social eating on the high street.
This essay looks at social eating in public space as a convivial action, through how social eating has been limited in gentrified high streets in London today, as well as through an alternative process of social eating; the street party. Street parties at two points in time and within socially different contexts are investigated, one being in relation to the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Birkenhead and the other a 2016 street party in Archway, London. They are explored as possibly having an impact on boundaries of security placed upon social life through the ‘adolescent mindset,’ Richard Sennett’s theories on urban life from his work The Uses of Disorder 1970, challenging the limiting ideals that are developing on the high street through the human need for security within self-imposed illusion of knowledge.
Order and Dis-Order Within the London Food Landscape
Photograph by Nigel Henderson.