Doing Audio-Visual Montage to Explore Time and Space: The Everyday Rhythms of Billingsgate Fish Market

This article documents, shows and analyses the everyday rhythms of Billingsgate,London's wholesale fish market. It takes the form of a short film based anaudio-visual montage of time-lapse photography and sound recordings, and atextual account of the dimensions of market life revealed by this montage.Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis , and the embodiedexperience of moving through and sensing the market, the film renders theelusive quality of the market and the work that takes place within it to make ithappen. The composite of audio-visual recordings immerses viewers in the spaceand atmosphere of the market and allows us to perceive and analyse rhythms,patterns, flows, interactions, temporalities and interconnections of marketwork, themes that this article discusses. The film is thereby both a means ofshowing market life and an analytic tool for making sense of it. This articlecritically considers the documentation, evocation and analysis of time and spacein this way.