A single wall, six different murals in three years, and a genuinely passionate local debate every single time about whether the latest one is actually any good.
There is a single wall near my flat that has, over roughly three years, hosted six entirely different murals, each one painted, admired, criticised, and eventually painted over to make way for the next, a rolling, ongoing local art exhibition that nobody officially curates but everybody in the neighbourhood seems to have very strong opinions about.
The current piece, a genuinely striking, large-scale portrait that went up a few months back, has already generated the specific kind of passionate neighbourhood debate this wall reliably produces, half the local voices I’ve spoken to calling it the best thing to grace that particular corner in years, the other half quietly, or not so quietly, missing whatever came before it.
What I find genuinely fascinating is how quickly a new piece gets absorbed into people’s actual daily navigation of the area, “meet me by the mural” having become genuine, functional shorthand for a specific spot regardless of which particular image happens to be occupying the wall at any given time, the location mattering considerably more than the current content.
I tracked down one of the artists responsible for an earlier iteration, who described the whole informal system with real affection, noting that painting over someone else’s work is treated, within the local street art community using that particular wall, as a kind of ongoing collaborative conversation rather than any genuine act of erasure or disrespect.
Whatever eventually replaces the current mural, and something inevitably will, the wall itself has become something considerably more interesting than any single image painted on it, a genuine, sustained piece of rolling community art that belongs, in the end, to nobody and everybody simultaneously.
For more on Shoreditch’s broader street art history and the informal rules that govern it, there’s a good piece at News Satire Websites.
More from this author at Cyndi Himmelstiere, prat.uk.
