During the last 60 years three forms of mobility have played a crucial role in the process of home-making across London – global migration, suburbanisation and gentrification. While these mobilities have been extensively analysed in terms of secular processes, the role of religion is becoming ever more evident and this paper seeks to contribute to this growing understanding by analysing the involvement by different Christian churches in the making of multiple homes across the metropolis. Various aspects of this home-making process are explored – the ways in which Anglican churches have responded to global migration and gentrification, as well as the challenges of increasing ethnic and ritual diversity for Methodist and Catholic congregations. Religion is intimately involved in diverse crossings of spatial and cultural boundaries and the construction of multiple dwellings (immediate and virtual). While global migration, suburbanisation and gentrification operate here in specific local contexts across a particular city, these modes of mobility operate around the globe and encourage comparison with American and Australian cities.

Pilgrimage in Britain has been transformed through the process of global migration since the end of the Second World War. In this article we focus on changes taking place within Christian pilgrimage through an analysis of the ways in which the relationship between centre and periphery has been reinterpreted. The first case study involves Polish pilgrims at a Roman Catholic shrine in the Kent countryside while the other focuses on Congolese Kimbanguists. The comparison reveals the ways in which global flows of people and ideas mediated through transnational networks have helped to blur the ideological boundaries between different Christian traditions. Furthermore, local places in the periphery are reinterpreted in conditions of increasing complexity where sacred centres in the countries of origin have to adapt to the emergence of new peripheries, which link up with other peripheries in the Kimbanguist case, and with differences between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Poles (settlers and sojourners) in the Polish example.

During the last twenty years around the world there has been a rapid increase in the number of people visiting long established religious shrines as well as the creation of new sites by those operating outside the boundaries of institutional religion. This increase is intimately associated with the revival of traditional routes, the creation of new ones and the invention of new rituals (religious, spiritual and secular). To examine this process, I will focus on the European region and two contrasting destinations in particular—the Catholic shrine of Lourdes, France, and the pre-Christian shrine of Avebury, England—drawing on my personal involvement in travelling to both destinations and being involved in ritual activities along the route and at the two destinations. In the discussion section of the paper, I will explore the relevance of these two case studies to the analysis of power, agency and performance and the ways in which they expose (a) the role of institutions and entrepreneurs in creating rituals and sacred places and (b) the relationship between people and the domesticated landscape.

Out of Giddens’ (1990) emphasis on modernity and Robertson's (1992) on globality emerges the need to conceptualize globalization in relation to the social per se. An exemplificatory conceptual case study points to global processes straining older concepts formed for nation state sociologies:deterrtorialization of the community concept results in the imagined community; global culture signals the fragmentation of the culture concept; ‘milieu ‘ has to be extended and generalized for global relevance. Globalization makes the structuration of new forms and types of groups and social relationships a key conceptual problem for sociology. But its impact also highlights the generative processes for new sociological concepts.

Drawing on existing research in the fields of pilgrimage and tourism studies, the introduction to this special issue reviews the ways in which guiding has been theorized and explored within the two fields, therefore putting them in dialogue with one another. Presenting guiding as a form of mediation, the authors construct a theoretical framework for the analysis of pilgrimage and guiding through adapting Eade and Sallnow’s (2000 [1991]) analytical triad of person, place and text. Arguing that person, place and text may fruitfully be seen as embedded in notions and practices of mediation, they explore (a) how such mediation involves forms of ideologically charged framing, editing, concealment and revelation, through which different and often competing accounts of pilgrimage journeys, destinations, and experiences are produced, and (b) the sources of legitimation of the various forms of guiding present in the fields of pilgrimage and travel, as well as their effects on journeys, participants, and destinations.