Brick Lane should come with a health warning: don't come anywhere near it when tired. It's sensory overload on 100% volume, with a strobe light and the taste of curry on your tongue.
So I've lived in London for a year and a half now and I feel I know the city pretty well. I know the difference between North, South, East and West. I can successfully nightbus from A to B. I have a map of shortcuts in my head. Tick. Tick. Tick. Perhaps the most the important lesson I've learnt about the city is that it'll never stay static enough for you to completely understand it. London can always catch you off-guard, like a good magician. Or a seasoned mugger.
Brick Lane is a bag of such surprises. The area's known for a few things: it's status as Banglatown, vintage shops, offbeat cafes. But it's also home to some of the most impressive street art in London.
You can spend a day roaming Brick Lane and still not See It All, so I decided to get some insider knowledge. A few friends and I booked ourselves onto an Alternative London Tour. It's a great company - the tours are conducted by street artists that work in the area and you only pay as much as you think the tour is worth.
Our guide was the London artist Josh Jeavons and over the course of two hours, in extremity-obliterating temperatures, he showed us his favourite pieces around Brick Lane.
For Jeavons, the area was an exhibition space. He spoke about how different pieces of street art became more prominent as the light changed or as streetlights were turned on. Although he led us to the usual attractions, such as Roa's giant bengali crane on Hanbury Street, Jeavons also drew our attention to more subtle graffiti: little bronze figurines on the tops of streetlights left by Jonsey or the message '99% of people won't notice this' on a wall tattooed with all the incarnations of 'Je suis Charlie.'
{At one point in the tour, the guide broke-off to say,"Alright, Russ." The group turned around to see Russell Brand, who briefly joined us. Only in London.}
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| {A soon-to-be knocked down VHil} |
Transience is a big feature of street-art, whether the work's illegal or commissioned. Jeavons described it as a piece's 'lifetime'. Even if the council or property owner doesn't paint over it, graffiti can be easily covered by another tag or a mural altered by another artist. The artist Lily Mixe even works in paper pasted onto walls that, organically, weathers away. A lot of the work is politically charged, so it makes perfect sense that there is some sort of visual discussion happening. The more respected the artist, the more untouched his or her work tended to be.
The last stop on the tour was the work above. Jeavons's described it as a 'game-changer'. The artist, who's tag name is VHil, had chip away at a wall to create the face - the depth of colour and shadow you can see is just the difference between exposed brick, plaster and whitewash. But in two weeks it won't exist anymore, as the building is scheduled to be demolished to make way for something new: a trend in the increasingly gentrified east.
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| {Hat, Topshop. Coat, Vintage C.1970s. Shirt, Vintage C.1990s Skirt, Topshop. Shoes, Topshop [included in this edit]} |
London's spectacular attempt to become artic demands the sheepskin. Horrendous bed-hair (the curse of the curly) requires the hat.
Here's one to listen to while on a street art safari: Kill Them With Colour, Always Something.
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