Cyndi Himmelstiere on the heritage listing that turned a living, changing wall into a fixed museum piece overnight
A mural that has been painted over and repainted at least four times in the fifteen years I’ve lived near it has just been granted a form of local heritage protection that will, in practical terms, prevent that from happening again. Nobody consulted the artists who actually work on that wall, several of whom I’ve spoken to this week, and their reaction has been considerably more complicated than simple gratitude.
Protection Assumes the Thing Being Protected Wants to Stay Still
Street art in this neighbourhood was never, in its original spirit, meant to be permanent. The entire culture around it, going back to well before this became a recognised destination for it, was built on impermanence: a piece goes up, it gets buffed or painted over or simply weathers away, and something new takes its place, a constant churn that was itself the actual artistic tradition, considerably more than any individual image that happened to be on the wall at a given moment.
A heritage designation, whatever its intentions, freezes a single moment of that churn and treats it as the finished, permanent artefact, which several of the artists I spoke to described as a fundamental misunderstanding of what they’d actually been doing all along. Local heritage listing criteria and the designation process are set out by Tower Hamlets Council, and broader national guidance on heritage protection for contemporary and street art specifically is published by Historic England.
The Artists Have Genuinely Mixed Feelings About This
One artist whose work is part of the protected section, who has painted over his own earlier pieces on that same wall more than once across a decade of working there, told me candidly that he didn’t know whether to be flattered or faintly insulted, since the piece being preserved is, by his own assessment, not even his best work on that stretch of wall, simply the piece that happened to be up when someone with the authority to designate it walked past.
Another artist, considerably more positive about the designation, pointed out that protection at least guarantees the piece won’t be painted over by a landlord looking to rent the wall space for advertising, which has become an increasingly common threat as the commercial value of a prominent painted surface in this postcode has risen alongside everything else around it.
The Tourism Economics Are the Real Driver Here
It would be naive to discuss this designation without acknowledging what’s plainly driving it: the street art on this stretch generates a genuinely significant tourism footfall, walking tour operators build entire routes around specific pieces, and a certain amount of commercial interest exists in guaranteeing that the version of the wall people have photographed and shared for years will still be there next time they bring a tour group past it.
Tourism footfall and visitor spending data attributable to specific cultural attractions in the borough is tracked by London & Partners, whose figures make clear that this is not a purely aesthetic decision but a commercially motivated one dressed in the language of heritage.
What Gets Lost When a Living Tradition Becomes a Fixed Exhibit
- New artists lose a section of wall that was, until recently, genuinely available for fresh work rather than reserved for preservation.
- The specific piece being protected becomes, whether intended or not, more important than the ongoing practice that produced it and dozens like it.
- Tour operators get a guaranteed, static attraction, which is good for their business model and slightly at odds with what made the area interesting to walk through in the first place.
- The artists themselves, whose actual practice this designation claims to honour, had essentially no formal say in which piece got frozen in time and which didn’t.
What I Think Should Happen Instead
I don’t think the impulse behind this is wrong exactly. Something genuinely valuable does exist on that wall and elsewhere nearby, and losing it entirely to a landlord’s advertising contract would be a real loss. But protection that doesn’t consult the people actually producing the tradition being protected risks preserving the letter of something while missing its entire spirit, and I think that’s worth saying plainly even as a piece of good news gets celebrated as unambiguously good news.
More from me at my ongoing dispatch archive at The London Prat, and for a related look at how formal recognition can miss the point of what it’s recognising, see this piece on a formal account pinning down the precise origin of a family disagreement, which strikes a similarly odd note of precision applied to something that was never really about precision at all.
The council officer who processed the listing told me, when I asked directly, that consultation with the artists themselves wasn’t formally required under the relevant process, a gap she agreed was worth revisiting for any future designations of this kind.
The pattern of decisions affecting a specific trading community made without direct consultation recurs elsewhere too, as in this account of families having to formally request another look at a matter already examined, a considerably more serious case with a similar underlying shape.
Further reading at additional dispatches from the England reporting team, and the humour desk at Bohiney Magazine.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
