Tag Archives: East End

Street art, street artist, Sweet Toof, London, Shoreditch, East End, Dalston, Rolf Carl Werner, shutters, BSMT, street art tour

New Sweet Toof Street Art

Sweet Toof is an East London street art legend, the ubiquitous teeth and pink gums were all over London.  Just before Christmas a new mural and several shutters painted by Sweet Toof appeared in Dalston, just up the road from Shoreditch.

These coincided with the opening of Sweet Toof’s first show in London for close to five years, a joint show with Swedish artist and graffiti writer Rolf Carl Werner, held at BSMT Gallery in Dalston.

Cut and Run Flyer courtesy BSMT Gallery

A full review of the show appears on sister blog Graffoto (same author!), including lots of historic photos of long lost  Sweet Toof street art with a particular look at some of the many times he has collaborated on the streets with other artists.

The show runs until this Sunday (14th January 2018), visiting the show could be the perfect complement to the Shoreditch Street Art Tour over the coming weekend.

All photos Dave Stuart except gallery flyer courtesy BSMT Gallery


Street Art First Impressions by “London Theatre Visits”

 

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Photo: Patsy Trench, London Theatre Visits

A large part of what Shoreditch Street Art Tours does could be described as evangelism on the part of street art culture.  This post by London Theatre Visits who recently enjoyed a Shoreditch Street Art Tour really captures the fantastic experience an articulate and enquiring visitor fired with curiosity but no prior knowledge gets our Tours.

Thanks Patsy

About London Theatre Visits: Patsy Trench says: ‘I have been arranging tours for overseas visitors for nearly twenty years, and teaching and lecturing in theatre for nearly as long. My tours are put together personally, by me, and can be tailored to suit whatever the customer demands.’

About Shoreditch Street Art Tours:    Shoreditch Street Art Tours provides walking tours of street art and graffiti around the Brick Lane and Shoreditch area.  In addition to daylight walking tours, Shoreditch Street Art Tours also runs small number groups of Night Street Art Photography Tours and Street Art Photography Workshops.  Founder and principal guide Dave aka NoLionsInEngland has been photographing, writing about and critiquing street art for nearly 10 years.

 


100th Tripadvisor Review Milestone

Woo hooooo – 100 Tripadvisor reviews for Shoreditch Street Art Tours!!!! Thank you very much to all our guests who have shared their love for Shoreditch Street Art Tours on Tripadvisor.

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100 UP!

99 reviewers rated us 5 star “Excellent” and a solitary 4 star “Very Good”  rounds up the century.  We love to read words like passionate, knowledgeble, personable, expert, empathetic, friendly, and enjoyable in our guests opinions.  These are your independent opinions, they matter to other members of the community and they really matter to us.

Once again, thanks to all of our guests for enjoying the world’s best outdoor gallery with Shoreditch Street Art Tours and special thanks to those who shared their positive opinions with the rest of the Tripadviser community, thanks to you guys Shoreditch Street Art Tours is currently ranked 14th best  out of 528 activities in London.

Update (27 Jan) – now ranking 13th (and rising?)

 


Shoreditch Street Art by 616 old and new

London street artist 616 has been a long-standing favourite among the guests of Shoreditch Street Art Tours, noted for his imaginative and ever changing use of materials.  The guests on this morning’s tour came across an intriguing 616 paste up.  The characteristic leaf design with tribal stylings is present and correct; nothing is out of the ordinary with a paste up either, so the thing that caught our attention was the stippled surface created from what looked like a white silicon mastic.

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Braille street art

The effect is to give the paste up an unusual rough finish, rub your hands over the artwork, you feel scratches, knots, lumps and shapes – then try doing that with a piece of art in a gallery!  616 art for the blind anyone?

 

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Braille street art

Check out a small cross section of other fabulous methods 616 has used to get up on Shoreditch walls in the past 2 years, including painted pistachio nut shells, found furniture, tar and feather, squeezy bottle, slate stones, graffiti paint scrapings, post office stickers…there are actually so many in our photo colection that we gave up trying to write them all down, enjoy the slide show!

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Graffiti Art Gallery Shows – let The 2014 Fun Commence

Things bode well for 2014 when the first “proper” week of 2014 has two great shows kicking off in the East End, though we are otherwise engaged with a Shoreditch Street Art Night Time Photography Tour.

Saber: The Ugly American

Saber MSK AWR is a graffiti legend based in LA, most famous for writing his name on the concrete bank of Los Angeles River, the largest piece of graffiti ever painted.  His work has crossed to the UK before, most recently for a 2012 group show with three other American legends, Ron English, Trusto Corp and Risk.  His art has previously touched on matters of national identity, public welfare provision and patriotism.  This time, Lazarides suggests “For The Ugly American, Saber has painted a series of impulsive abstract works which illustrate the excesses of American society.”  Abstract calligraphy but check for hidden naughty words.

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Saber – BRP 2012
East End, art show, preview, opening, Saber, MS,AWR, Shoreditch, street art, graffiti

Saber – The Ugly American

The Outsiders Gallery

8 Greek St

London W1D 4DG

RSVP required (according  their email, RSVP by replying to mailinglist@lists.lazinc.com.  That’s what it says!)

 

 

ID Crew: Surrounded By Idiots

ID Crew (Ivory Dukes, Idiots Crew) has at its heart some of London’s most influential and artistic graffiti writers.  Crew membership has evolved over time but from the thesaurus of alternative words for Idiot on the show flyer we can expect to find Shucks, Tizer, Wisher, Mace, Jobe, Relay, Stika, Crow, Pref, Imerse, Ike, Gent & Aces.   This is sure to be a massive meeting of London faces in what is possibly Shoreditch’s smallest gallery, expect crowded streets and somebody to un-expectedly find a marker “just lying on the ground officer” at some point.  Skimming through the photo library to select a few images to illustrate the work of these guys has been a huge, distracting pleasure!

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Idiots Crew

Graffiti Life Gallery

24 Cheshire St,

London E2 6EH


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2013 Street Art Review

Shoreditch Street Art Tours wishes its readers, past guests and future guests a happy, safe and culture filled 2014!

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Dal East

On the Shoreditch Street Art Tours blog we published 74 posts about the street art we saw in 2013, which is rather a lot!   As we look forward to Street Artists in Shoreditch continuing to produce new and exciting working 2014, we thought it would be fun to look back on the brilliant, the colourful and the clever work of 2013.

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Art Is Trash

Our sister blog Graffoto, written on those days when we need to kick back and chill even more than on our “Shoreditch Street Art Tour” days has a great review of the best of the illegal and non permissioned work in London in 2013, click HERE.

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RYCA

There is also a part 2 to the review, published shortly before midnight on New Years Eve, which looks at the bigger and more spectacular mural side of street art, check that out HERE.

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D*Face

Virtually all the street art, even the pieces out in Hackney (!) photographed in those two reviews was seen on Shoreditch Street Art Tours in 2013!

 

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Three

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Unknown

All Photos: NoLionsInEngland


Street Art, photography, Shoreditch, Street Art Tours, East End, London,Clet Abraham

Shoreditch Street Art Tours Guest Photographs

Shoreditch’s street art is incredibly photogenic, lending itself to sensational colourful images whether you are using a camera phone or a full frame ultra high spec digital SLR.

On a recent tour Robert Benson brought along a lovely Nikon which happens to be the same camera I use when I am out photographing street art on days when I am not leading street art tours.  Robert has sent over a selection of the lovely photographs that he took on his visit and Shoreditch Street Art Tours is delighted to share them with you, thank you Robert.

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Photographs: Robert Benson


Kick-Ass 2 Fans Get Creative In Shoreditch, London

No two days are the same with Shoreditch Street Art Tours thanks to the ever changing art panorama in Shoreditch.  Last Saturday one of the things we decided to do on a whim was visit the famous Rockwell House rooftop where Jim Vision and Mattie were hosting a live Kick Ass 2 comic canv-ass event.

 

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Kick-Ass 2 on Rockwell House Roof

Several of our guests got stuck right in with spray cans and marker pens and feature in this great film which shows how Rockwell House really captured the spirit of Kick Ass with their fun event.

Amusingly (for me) it is apparent from the film that on Saturday I chatted with someone whose name I didn’t get but turns out to be someone I have been a fan of for years…Dr Zadok, wow, Kick ASS!!!

Street Art, Jim Vision,Shoreditch,Street Art Tour, East End, London,Kick Ass 2, Movie, live, painting

Dr Zadok as seen on Shoreditch Street Art Tour

Many thanks Jim, Mattie and Dr Zadok for your hospitality.

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Kick-Ass 2 on Rockwell House Roof

Street Art, Jim Vision,Shoreditch,Street Art Tour, East End, London,Kick Ass 2, Movie, live, painting

Kick-Ass 2 on Rockwell House Roof


Free Street Art by Mr.Farenheit Found in Shoreditch

One of the great joys of exploring street art around the east end of London is the un-expected discovery of some delicious work which you can and are supposed to take home and cherish.  Guests of Shoreditch Street Art Tours have found a really great piece of Free Art by the London stalwart Mr.Farenheit.

Street art is generally supposed be enjoyed by the public so Shoreditch Street Art Tours would never encouragethe theft of street art, so the tour group engaged in quite a discussion about what Free Art is and whether the piece we found was art the artist intended a lucky person to take and keep.

Free, Street Art, Mr.Farenheit,Shoreditch,Street Art Tour, East End, London

Stepping back a bit, what the heck is Free Art?  Free Art is art that the artist does indeed intend a lucky person to find, collect and keep.   Artists use a code to signal that their art is intended to be free, which is that it is not painted on a fixed street surface, nor pasted, glued, nailed, welded or secured or fastened to the surface in any other way which would suggest that it was meant to stay there.

There were a number of clues suggesting this lovely work by Mr.Farenheit was indeed intended to go to a nice new home off the streets.  The first was that it sort of sat proud of the door’s surface like it was meant to be lifted, it didn’t look secured permanently to the surface.   Secondly, we are very familiar with the prolific Mr.Farenheit – you don’t get nominated in our Top 25 Shoreditch Street Artists for nothing you know – and his street art output is almost entirely stencilled or printed on paper, rarely if ever before have we seen it on cardboard.  The cardboard suggests it was intended to last longer, though “archival quality” would be an exaggeration.   Mr.Farenheit always pastes his paper art to the surface, looking into the gap behind this cardboard we could see that in fact it was just held on with Blutac.

Free, Street Art, Mr.Farenheit,Shoreditch,Street Art Tour, East End, London

mine

When we did lift the cardboard off the door on the reverse was a “U So Porno Baby” Mr.Farenheit sticker effectively “signing” the art, no artist would “sign” the rear of a piece of street art that was intended to remain in situ.  Any lingering doubt was dispelled back at Shoreditch Street Art Tour’s bat cave when Mr.Farenheit’s online photograph collection revealed that he was indeed playing Father Christmas.

So, a very nice souvenir of London street art heads back to Bristol though you might infer from the second picture here, Nephew A may have disputed  Uncle B’s divine right to the piece [real names changed!]

This wasn’t the first piece of free art taken home by guests of Shoreditch Street Art Tours:

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Free Art Found!

Photos: NoLionsInEngland