Inland/ On the Representation of Landscape in Migrant-Run Restaurants in London

The following text reflects on the construction of the notions of landscape and identity in some migrant communities in the city of London. Drawing on landscape images used as restaurant decoration, it examines the role these images play as a form of landscape that negotiates different meanings and associations. How does one inhabit a place to which one does not belong? How does an immigrant appropriate an unfamiliar territory and construct a local identity? These questions are explored through research based on a methodological intersection between photographic practice and ethnography, in which owners and managers of migrant-run restaurants in the areas of Bayswater, Brixton, Brick Lane, Soho and Kingsland Road were visited, interviewed and documented. Through the combination of narratives (stories told in the interviews) and photographs, the text examines the relationships these landscape images establish within their contexts. It offers a theoretical reflection that analyses the problems inherent in landscape representation, and reviews the fieldwork experience and the different discourses that emerge around landscape and its representation. It argues that these images, often used as mere decorations evoking an idealised place, give us access to the relationships these communities maintain with their countries of origin. In this way, these images not only portray a space/time distant from, and exotic in relation to, British reality, but also materialise the discourses that exist about those places.