Peckham, Poundland, Post its and the Peace Wall: Staging a Post-Riot Renewal

This presentation explores the response of residents in Peckham, an inner city London community, to the riots that took place in August 2011. On a boarded up shop window they created the ‘Peacewall’ - a mass of post-it notes declaring the nature of their relationships with to Peckham. The Peacewall became a national icon of post-riot renewal. By drawing on anthropological scholarship on south Asian communal riots, and more recent writing on the use of post it notes within corporations, I provide an ethnographic account of post riot renewal and an exploration of Post it notes as tools in the staging and articulation of ideas by those in positions of structural weakness.