Cyndi Himmelstiere on the survival of one piece of street art across fifteen years of relentless redecoration, the building owner who refuses to remove it, and what it tells us about who decides what is permanent
At the southern end of Hoxton Square, on the side wall of a building now occupied on the ground floor by a small architecture practice, there is a mural. The mural has been there, in its current form, for substantially more than a decade. It is one of the only pieces of street art in this corner of the borough that has survived the industrial redecoration of the past fifteen years. Building on my earlier work at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, I want to write today about why.
The Mural Itself
The mural is, I should say at the outset, not by anyone famous. It is not a Banksy. It is not a Stik. It is not by any of the substantial roster of street artists whose work, in this borough, can be identified at thirty paces by anyone with even a passing interest in the form. The mural is by an artist who, as far as I have been able to determine, has not produced any other major work in London since this one.
The mural depicts, in the broadest description I can offer, a figure looking up at the sky. The figure is, in palette, predominantly blue. The sky, behind the figure, is a substantially more complicated blue, made up of what I would estimate to be at least eleven distinct shades. The figure’s expression is, depending on the time of day and the quality of the light, either contemplative or vaguely resigned. I have, over fifteen years, walked past it on most of the days I have lived in this borough, and I have not, in that time, formed a stable view of which expression it is.
The Survival Question
The substantial majority of murals in this part of the borough have, in the past fifteen years, been painted over, at least once. Some have been painted over five or six times. The standard pattern is that an artist puts something up, the wall is left alone for a few months or, in the lucky case, a year or two, and then either the building owner repaints the wall or another artist puts something on top of it. According to The Evening Standard, recent reporting on the East London street art economy has documented the substantial impermanence of the form, with the substantial majority of pieces lasting substantially less than two years.
The Hoxton Square mural has, against this background, persisted. It has not been painted over by the building owner. It has not, as far as I have been able to determine in fifteen years of professional observation, been painted over by another artist. It is, in the East London street-art context, a piece of substantial and unusual permanence.
The Building Owner
The reason the mural has survived is, I believe, the building owner. I have not, despite repeated attempts, succeeded in interviewing the building owner. The architecture practice on the ground floor has been, on the substantial majority of occasions when I have asked, polite but unhelpful. The freeholder, as far as I have been able to determine through Land Registry searches, is a small property company whose registered address is in Wapping, and whose principal director has, on the two occasions I have called, declined to come to the telephone.
The story I have, in fragments, assembled from various people who claim to know various things, is roughly as follows. The mural was painted, with the building owner’s permission, in the late 2000s. The building owner, who is or was an art enthusiast of some kind, took a substantial liking to the piece. The building owner has, in the years since, maintained a standing position with whoever is leasing the ground floor that the mural is to remain in place. This position has been honoured by, by my count, at least three successive ground-floor tenants.
What This Tells Us
The Hoxton Square mural is, in this sense, an instance of a wider question that I find myself, as a Shoreditch correspondent, returning to repeatedly: who, in the contemporary East London streetscape, has the practical power to make something permanent? The answer, dear reader, is the building owner. The building owner is, in nearly every case, the person whose preferences determine whether a piece of public art on a private wall lasts a year or fifteen.
This is, on one hand, a banal observation about property law. Of course the building owner decides what is on the side of their building. They own the side of the building. On the other hand, in a part of London where street art is a substantial part of the visual identity of the area, the practical effect is that the people who shape the look of Hoxton Square are not, in any meaningful sense, the artists or the local council or the residents. They are, instead, a small set of building owners whose preferences, taken collectively, constitute a kind of unofficial public art commission.
The Council Question
I have written before, in my previous columns on the East London street-art economy, that there is, in this borough, no formal public mechanism for protecting murals. The council does not, in the substantial majority of cases, have a register of murals worth preserving. The council does not, in the substantial majority of cases, have planning powers to prevent the painting-over of an existing piece. According to The Guardian, recent research on the protection of UK street art has documented that the substantial majority of preservation cases depend, in the end, on the goodwill of building owners.
This is, to my mind, an under-reported gap in cultural-heritage policy. The form of street art, as it has developed in Shoreditch over the past two decades, is in important respects a piece of the cultural-heritage record of this part of the city. The fact that there is no formal public protection for any individual piece is, in important respects, a structural choice. It is also, I think, a choice that will, at some point, be revisited.
What I Would Do
I am not, dear reader, advocating that the council should, by some new bureaucratic process, decide which murals are worth preserving. The bureaucratic process would, in all probability, be slow, contentious, and would substantially fail to produce the outcomes that the form actually requires. I am, however, advocating that we, as the people who live alongside these works, should be substantially more attentive to which ones are still here and how they got that way.
The Hoxton Square mural is, in this sense, a piece of public art whose continued existence depends, week by week, on the goodwill of one person who has, for fifteen years, declined to come to the telephone. This is, in the broad sweep of cultural history, a substantially fragile arrangement. I would like, in 2056, for that mural still to be there. I do not know that it will be.
For more of my dispatches from this end of the borough, you can find me at my page on The London Prat.
For satirical takes on street-art-as-cultural-question, see The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
