Up to this point on our trip, we had been able to get anywhere we wanted in London by taking the tube and making at most one transfer (although once we had to transfer to a rail line instead of another tube line). To get from Queen Elizabeth Hall in Lambeth to Shoreditch for the start of our graffiti tour, our fastest option was to take a bus. This gave me the opportunity to ride on the top level of a double-decker bus, which I have always wanted to do. There was someone already sitting in the first row with the best view of the front window, but realizing that we were tourists, she kindly offered to let us sit there instead. From our lofty perch, we were able to get a different perspective of the streets of London, and were even able to view at eye level some graffiti works that had been painted up high. We would learn on
the graffiti tour that this artist who drew the cute “stick-men” figures was aptly
named “Stik”.
En route to the graffiti tour, we stopped by the quirky novelty gift shop named “Hoxton Street Monster Supplies” which advertises itself as a store catering to monsters. The store is tiny but packed with weird and wonderful offerings. It sells Werewolf Biscuits, Fang Floss (a spool of thick rope), Miniature Eyeballs (probably gumballs?), chutneys and spreads with names like “Thickest Human Snot”, “Guts and Garlic Chutney” and “Old Fashion Brain Jam”, jars of Fairy Dust (made from real fairies), and bags and tins of candies with names like “Brain Food made from real brain bits”, “Toasted Bone Crunch”, “Night Sweats”, “Creeping Dread”, “Cubed Ear Wax” and more. The sign on the front door states “The Proprietor is hereby licensed to sell … Malodorous Gases, Children’s Ears, Gore, Fear (Tinned only) … and other items as specified in the Monster Retailer’s Act of 1827, Clause 14, Subsection 5, Revision (b). There is an empty pet basket with a sign above it warning you not to pet the invisible cat since he is temperamental.
Shoreditch, with its sub-district of Hoxton, is located in the North-East end of London and is known as a hub for street art with many streets featuring long stretches of graffiti-covered buildings. Our three-hour graffiti tour was led by Frank Malt, aka Steam156, a former graffiti artist and expert on the international graffiti culture, who has written several books including “Street Art London” and “100 UK Graffiti Artists”. By way of introduction, Frank showed us photos from the 1980s of his start in illegal graffiti, jumping on and off of trains and scaling fences, before transitioning to commissions and legal murals, followed by his role as street art documenter through his books, magazines and commissioned pieces for TV. These days Frank claims he is too old for the physicality of traditional graffiti activities. Now he deals in stickers, posting his trademark STEAM156 spray can sticker around the world as he travels. As a thank you for accommodating his request to move our tour start time, Frank offered me a “free map” and asked what name I wanted on it. I had no idea what he was referring to, but told him to use the name “Annie”. What I received at the start of the tour was a personalized graffiti rendering of my name, drawn on a tube station map and signed by Steam156. It even has the coincidentally appropriate saying at the bottom to form the phrase “Annie Get Your Spray Gun”, which thrilled the musical lover in me.
Our tour started at the Shoreditch Grind coffee shop near the Old Street tube station and was split into two parts. The first two hours were spent looking at works within a few blocks of the starting point, covering Old Street, Whitecross Street where an annual street art festival is held, as well Great Eastern, Tabernacle and Blackall Streets. In these first two hours, we received an overview about the history of graffiti, its different formats including tags and throw-ups depicting the artist’s name or identifier in bubble or wild (illegible except by the artist) styles, street art and murals, stencils, posters, stickers and even street sculptures. Frank familiarized us with some of the prolific graffiti artists that ply their trade in London, showing us how to recognize their telltale styles and signature imagery. The third hour was an add-on and we were the only members of our tour group who had opted for this. It was lucky we did, since it was in this final hour that we were taken a bit farther afield to view a couple of Banksy pieces that were still intact and in fairly good condition.
We were shown multiple examples of works by (Ben) Eine who paints provocative words such as “CHANGE”, “WORTH”, “PEACE”, “TRUTH” in type fonts using stencils. Because the lettering is legible and stylized, and the words he chooses can be considered to be profound, his work is treated as street art as opposed to graffiti. He is known for painting a single letter of the alphabet on shop shutters in Shoreditch including one street in East London that was re-dubbed “Alphabet Street” where he painted the entire alphabet in that area. Eine also works commercially, designing scarfs for Louis Vuitton and creating a piece that reads “TWENTY FIRST CENTURY CITY” which was given as a gift to President Obama by Prime Minister David Cameron.
Rich and I were most excited to see a piece by Phlem, who specializes in black and white drawings that feature storybook-like imagery, often incorporating elements of the city in which the work is situated. Often it includes half-human, half-woodland creatures, winding staircases, castles and turrets. Phlem is a name that we actually recognized since recently, he was commissioned to create a giant mural on the side of a wall just next to our home. It depicts a seated humanoid form, but when you look closely, inside the form are images of buildings and landscapes that can be found within Toronto including the CN Tower. Another interesting artist is Chet Abrahams, who cleverly makes additions to road signs in order to create amusing and creative new images. We spotted a “Do Not Enter” sign that he turned into a man locked in a stockade, as well as a “Motorized Vehicles Prohibited” sign that he turned into what looks like a caped Evel Knievel-like daredevil jumping over a row of cars. We were impressed by the detail in ROA’s finely drawn rendering of animals including the hog that he ironically drew on a wall on Bacon Street. And for some reason, I’m particularly drawn to Nathan Bowen’s cartoon characters whose faces and sometimes the bodies are obscured by big scribble marks that give the feeling of frenetic motion.
We were shown how to recognize certain artists by their distinctive styles or signature tags or symbols. Don Paul Smith (a.k.a. Don One) creates multi-layered stencil portraits, often of well-known celebrities or characters such as Marlon Brando, Bob Hoskins, Mr. Spock from Star Trek or Harry Potter. His tell-tale tag is the black outline of a seated man with a tap emanating from his bowler hat. Parisian artist C215 (a.k.a. Christian Guémy) also uses stencils to create portraits but in his case, it is usually of the common man on the street. His symbol is a blue cube with his pseudonym C215 encoded into it. Frenchman Thierry Noir is known as the first street artist to paint on the Berlin Wall. His cartoonish images of brightly coloured, elongated profiles with big lips painted in contrasting colour are easily recognizable once you know what to look for. SubDude makes biting satirical political statements using his screen print technique. Donald Trump makes for an easy target and there are many works based on him including one entitled “Tangerine Tyrant”. Having seen round blue heritage signs throughout London, we were surprised when we saw one on a graffiti-covered wall on Blackall Street until closer inspection revealed that it was a graffiti drawing in and of itself. Drawn by K-Guy, it was a tribute to Ed Seymour, inventor of the aerosol spray can, which obviously had significant impact on the graffiti world.
While we have been on graffiti walks before in various cities including our home city of Toronto, we were primarily shown tags and street art. This tour of Shoreditch exposed us to the concept of street sculptures and they were really awesome. At the time of our tour, there was not a local an example of Spaniard Francisco de Pajoro’s art made out of people’s trash, so we had to settle for looking at photos of them. This was too bad, since these whimsical garbage sculptures were my favourite. You need to look down on the ground to spot Ben Wilson’s “bubblegum art” which he creates by painting and varnishing wads of chewing gum that he finds on the pavement. By contrast, you need to look up to spot Christiaan Nagel’s colourful mushrooms made out of polyurethane which he places on roof tops and high up on walls of buildings. Invader, a French graffiti artist, is known for his ceramic tile mosaics of alien characters from the video game Space Invaders, as well as other images. In addition to the space invaders which we saw everywhere, we were also shown one created in the images of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader from Star Wars. Invader’s works can be found across 33 countries. Cityzen Kane makes clay sculptures of squids, sea creatures and molds of faces which are a bit like painted death masks, and adheres them to walls.
In the first two hours of our tour, we were shown some locations of where famous Banksy works used to be, while Frank showed us photos of them and talked about their backstories. These included Banksy's “Happy Chopper” helicopter piece that still exists but can no longer be seen from the street because the restaurant that owns the wall put a fence to block it, and a representation of the gangsters from Pulp Fiction holding bananas instead of guns. While this was mildly interesting, it was not the same as viewing the actual works in situ. Luckily in our third hour, we were taken to see some Banksy works that still exist. First we saw what looks like a cut-out portion of a brick wall containing the “Snorting Copper” which shows a policeman bent over on his hands and knees with a straw snorting cocaine. The portion of the wall had to be cut out of its original location on Curtain Road in order to restore the artwork, but Frank told us that initially, Banksy had painted a thin white line on the ground to represent the cocaine. We were then taken to Cargo, a beer hall on Rivington Street built inside a railway tunnel whose brick walls are filled with graffiti. Inside Cargo, protected by plexiglass, are two more Banksy works—“This Wall is a Designated Graffiti Area” contains the titular text along with the image of a policeman walking a French poodle, while “His Master's Voice” shows a terrier holding a rocket launcher aimed at a record player, a spoof subverting an RCA Victor trademark which depicts the dog looking innocently at a windup gramophone.
Across from Cargo on Rivington Street is a poignant piece by Bambi, considered the “female Banksy” for the social commentaries on politics and social injustice reflected in her work. In this case, she covered the wall with the repeated image of a young boy with his arm raised, his foot on a skull and the words “Don’t Shoot” written in red block lettering. This work refers to the case of Michael Brown, a black man shot by a white policeman in Missouri, USA which led to the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protests in the community. Pure Evil is another prolific street artist in London who is known for his stencil drawings of iconic women such as Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Audrey Hepburn with bleeding eyes that drip with a black blotch and black streak down their faces. He has his own “Pure Evil Gallery” located in Shoreditch and I have even seen his work in contemporary art galleries in Toronto. After our tour was over and we were heading back to a tube station for the trip home, we continued to spot interesting street art. We saw a mural titled “Connectivity Matters” which covered multiple sides of a building. It was a collaboration between two Italian artists, Hunto who draws vivid, colourful Picasso-like images and Mister Thoms, whose interconnected fantastical creatures consist of geometrical shapes and large features that range from whimsical to grotesque. Blending the two styles made for a work that was unique and complementary. We also passed by a mural that was work in progress and it was interesting to watch the process as the artist on the ladder was painting images that had previously been lightly outlined on the wall. This must have been a commissioned piece since they were working freely, out in the open on a busy street in the middle of the day.
Prior to coming to London, we received a recommendation from our friends to visit the chocolate shop Dark Sugars while we were in Shoreditch. It seemed like destiny when we passed by this store right at the end of our graffiti walk, so that we did not even need to search for it. It is run by Nyanga, who learned about cocoa from her family farm in Ghana and the Ghanaian cocoa beans that she brought back are used in the production of chocolates and truffles. We tried a variety of chocolates including an orange variety of her signature chocolate pearls, which contain flavoured ganache covered with a smooth chocolate shell that makes these treats resemble coloured pearls. We also sampled the Hazelnut Crunch, which is a Milk chocolate ball filled with creamy milk chocolate ganache and hazelnut chunks, rolled in crunchy hazelnut feuilletine (a crunchy crepe-like pastry), and the strawberry-rosewater truffle in a white and dark chocolate cup that was so pretty that I had to buy one. These were the perfect treats to end a long day of walking before heading home.
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