Walk the back streets off Brick Lane and you will find murals that predate half the buildings now surrounding them. Some are protected. Most aren’t.
Turn off Brick Lane onto any of the quieter side streets and you will still find exactly what first put this neighbourhood on the map for an entire generation of visitors: walls layered thick with street art, some pieces decades old, painted over and repainted so many times the underlying brick has probably forgotten what colour it originally was. It remains, even now, one of the genuinely reliable pleasures of working this beat, wandering a familiar back street and discovering something new has appeared overnight, without warning, exactly the way this particular art form is meant to function.
What has changed, and changed considerably over the years I have been covering this neighbourhood, is the relationship between that street art and the buildings surrounding it. A meaningful share of the murals I used to photograph on a fairly reliable basis have, over time, simply vanished, painted over during renovation, demolished alongside the building they lived on, or quietly buffed away by a property owner who never much cared for the artwork in the first place and finally got round to removing it once a lease changed hands. The street art that made this neighbourhood famous has become, increasingly, a fragile and genuinely endangered layer of its own cultural history, protected in only the most piecemeal, inconsistent way.
A small number of the most significant pieces have secured genuine protection through listed building status attached to the structures they sit on, a workaround that offers real, if narrow, security precisely because it ties the artwork’s legal standing to the physical building rather than to any dedicated street art preservation policy, which, as far as I have been able to determine through fairly extensive digging, simply does not exist in any comprehensive form at the local authority level. Everything else survives purely at the discretion of whoever currently owns the wall it happens to be painted on, which is, to put it mildly, not much of a safeguard against a neighbourhood changing hands as rapidly as this one continues to.
I think there is something worth naming plainly here about what gets formally protected in a regeneration process and what does not. New developments arriving under schemes like the wider Future Shoreditch plan will, by all accounts, restore and protect certain listed heritage structures with real care and real budget attached. Street art, by its nature unauthorised, uninsured, and legally precarious even at the best of times, rarely receives anything close to that same institutional consideration, despite being, in my own honest assessment, at least as culturally significant to what actually made this neighbourhood internationally recognisable in the first place.
None of which is an argument that every single piece of graffiti in Shoreditch deserves formal heritage protection, an obviously unworkable proposition given the sheer volume and constantly shifting nature of the form itself. It is an argument that a neighbourhood building its entire international reputation, in no small part, on this specific art form owes it slightly more consideration than the current entirely accidental, ownership-dependent system of preservation currently provides.
Go and look at what is still standing while it is still standing. I say that about most things in this neighbourhood these days, admittedly, but I mean it with particular urgency about the walls.
More from this author at Cyndi Himmelstiere, prat.uk.
