Kirsty Hooper

Islands in the Street: Hispanic Islands in the British Topographical Imagination

Hispanic islands have long had a privileged place in the British imagination, from 16^th-century commerce with the Canary Islands, via 18^th-century imperial adventures in Cuba and the Balearics, to the island-based mass tourism of the 20^th century. This paper considers how hitherto unseen resonances of these inter-island connections might be captured through their presence in the British streetscape. Drawing on an extensive database of Hispanic-inflected British place, street and house names in which islands dominate, it reflects on what we might gain from the civic, collective, familial and individual histories behind this largely ignored but very public set of data.