Tag Archives: review

A Decade Of Political Street Art

The third of our series reflecting on the street art we have enjoyed over the past 10 years looked at the street art that appeared on our streets.

Banksy had a lot to contribute politically over the past decade of course.

Banksy, Brexit, Dover

Much of the art was done without permission though there were the occasional huge campaigning murals.

Dave The Chimp – Education Is Not A Crime

Here is a slide show showing the photos that we pulled out of our archives, the full descriptive text about the political street art is on Graffoto, our other blog

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Street Art, review, 2010s, Graffoto.co.uk, street art tours, tour guide, political street art, Banksy, Cept, EINE, Bambi, subdued, Tom Blackford, CodeFC, Uberfubs, Extinction Rebellion

Banksy – If Graffiti Changed Anything, It Would Be Illegal, London 2011

Part 1 of the Decade 2010 reviews looked at where Street Art was in 2020: here

Part 2 was a look back at spectacular murals: here

All photos: Dave Stuart, principal guide and founder, Shoreditch Street Art Tours

10 years After

Can you believe the decade is over? Our sister blog Graffoto has been looking at street art for the whole of the decade, looking back fondly over what has amazed us, where and how the art was created and by whom.

Street Art, review, 2010, Graffoto.co.uk, street art tours, tour guide

MIghty Mo, Goldpeg

Its going to be a series of thematic blog posts, looking at say murals, sculpture, non permissioned art… and more. To be honest, until we write it we don’t know what it’s going to cover but it will be great.

Herakut

This isn’t a list of the top 50, or the “best of”, because for starters it is generally based on what we actually experienced but with occasional reference to scene as it developed elsewhere. It starts with a look at street art in Shoreditch at the start of the decade, just so you can see in the subsequent posts who much things have developed since.

Isaac Cordal

The full text supporting each of the images and why they were definitive is including in the Graffoto blog, written by the same author in case you were unsure, here is a slide show of the visuals that defined our landscape back in 2010.

Antony Lister

Remember to follow to pick up the full series and do tell your friends.

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Links:

Graffoto “The Decade Is Dead, Long Live The Decade”

All photos: Dave Stuart

Shoreditch Street Art February Highlights

February was a month of unrelenting street art activity by street artists in Shoreditch, mainly wearing anoraks and wellington boots. Most months of the year, my friend HowAboutNo, the guy who has spent the best part of the past 10 years oscillating between wandering streets and alleys exploring street art with me and propping up a bar with me, and I throw together a pictorial review of the months street art with a few pithy words for description. in February, a month where the elements really tested the longevity of paper based art, with a sculptural slant. Here are just a small selection of the highlights, for the full recap it will be worth popping over to our private blog Graffoto

Love Piepenbrinck placed several new fancy dress piggies out on the streets and has teased us with a photo on Facebook caption “Most Hidden Piggy – almost impossible to even photograph”, which we haven’t seen hide nor hair of.

LovePiepenbrinck

Without doubt one of the cleverest and most exciting things we have seen this month, perhaps this year, has been Borondo’s face by the canal on Hackney Wick, already drooled over on this blog here.

Dee One’s Heavenly Rejects has been a delightful presence on the Shoreditch streets for about a year, his work such as they devils painted on acorns is often easy to pass by. One of his most pleasing and most difficult to spot is this aquatic scene.

Dee One

Full review of the month on Graffoto.

All photos NoLionsInEngland

Street Art First Impressions by “London Theatre Visits”

Shoreditch, London, East End, Street Art, graffiti, tour, walks, tours, review, feedback

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.

Shoreditch,East End, London, tripadvisor,Street art, street, art,review, reviews

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 14^th best out of 528 activities in London.

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

2013 Street Art Review

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

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.

London,East End,Shoreditch,Street Art,2013, Review,ALO, D*Face

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.

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.

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!

Three

Unknown

All Photos: NoLionsInEngland

D*Face “One Man And His Dog” Book Review

D*Face has an almost peerless right to be regarded as father to London’s street art scene and guests of Shoreditch Street Art Tours will know that I position him as globally significant. This great new self penned book lays out clearly the evidence to justify those garlands.

D*Face “One Man And His Dog” Book

Hardback
500 colour illustrations
344 pages
290 x 240 mm
ISBN 9781780672779
Published November 2013
Laurence King Publishing Ltd.
Weight 1 tonne 😉

There are plenty of stories lifting the curtain on D*Face escapades which make fascinating reading, such as the driver turning up to deposit six 1 tonne poured cement spraycan sculptures around central London tourist spots wearing a German army officer’s hat with plastic doll’s legs sticking out the sides.

Shoreditch,London,Street Art, Street artist,DFace, D*Face,Book,photos,review

Limited Edition boxed version, photo: Laurence King Publishing

The 2010 installation of the Zombie Oscars in Hollywood struck me at the time as one of the ballsiest illegal street piece installations and I am not sure there has been much to challenge that status since.

Zombie Oscar, Mels Dinner

Few of the revelations are quite as astonishing as what D*Face’s wife carved in ice on a 2006 trip to the Arctic circle but you’ll have to read the book to get that little nugget!

Banksy is eventually mentioned as a friend, partner and collaborator though one gets the impression that D*Face remains a little sore at Banksy’s sudden universal withdrawal from social contact in 2007.

There is a revealing anecdote regarding a war dividend painting he did on a building site hoarding which featured a collage of corporate logos of companies profiteering by securing privileged post war access into Iraq. An advertising agency who claimed to like D*Face’s work were a bit put out at their client’s logos being corrupted in this way, so their course of action options were Plan A follow a due process, engage lawyers, issue cease and desist letters, follow up with compliance and enforcement notices etc, or plan B, send down a young girl on an internship with a roller and a bucket of paint and have her paint it out. D*Face’s self confessed anger overwhelms any admiration of the ironic “do it yourself” punk approach the agency adopted!

“I thrive on the visual, ephemeral feast that surrounds us City dwellers, from the overlaid and torn flyposters to the tagged doorways, the jammed rotating billboards displaying parts of two adverts at the same time and the chopping of sounds I hear while cycling through traffic. I am naturally drawn to my visual environment.”

At several points we get a sense of the inherent conflicts of being a street artist, a gallery artist and a gallery owner, particularly where it comes to relationships with the law! In 2008 I was intrigued by D*Face’s switch to showing with Black Rat press and in the book we now learn that showing with an outside gallery frees D*Face to concentrate on producing the art and secondly, Black rat offered a step enhancement in screen printing refinement above and beyond what had become the Pictures on Walls standard in-house product. The resulting “aPOPcalypse Now” was a stunning show that I found simultaneously mesmerising and disorientating (pics here).

Having said the book reveals all, there are perhaps a few things curiously overlooked. Apart from a note in the shouts at the back I didn’t find any mention of the 2003 Finders Keepers exploits. I’m going to extrapolate, infer and guess a bit here but Finders Keepers was about the punk do-it-yourself approach, some of the key Finders keepers members have recently shown with Stolen Space and appear to be still in touch with D*Face, others plough a far more independent, righteous and outside-the-system furrow quite distant from the path D*Face has followed, so perhaps there is some breakdown of the old intente cordial there.

There is even a full page sticker kit, I wonder if anyone will ever be mad enough to remove the stickers..just keep the book out of the hands of 5 year olds.

In among all the material which revives memories for me of stuff I lived and experienced as a fan looking in from the outside, I was surprised to find strands to D*Face’s work which I have no recollection of, such as the butterflies and insects which are clearly influenced by Damien Hirst.

“Trying to explain to US border police why you have an industrial drill with you for a holiday is no easy task,”

If you like the work of d*Face or have found this review interesting, you might like to do a little time travel and see a bit of previous stuff written by NoLionsInEngland (ok…yes, that’s me too!) on the door closing 2013 solo show at the old Stolen Space premises a,d, as noted before a small number of my flicks from the 2008 aPOPcalypse show are here.

This is a large and heavy book, there are hundreds and hundreds of fascinating photos in there of both outdoor and indoor work. Clear some shelf space and pick up a great read.

Book text copyright: Dean Stockton

Book photos copyright: as stated in the book

Publisher link: http://www.laurenceking.com/en/the-art-of-d-face-one-man-and-his-dog

Photos NoLionsinengland except where noted

PS – stickers photographer’s own 😉

Another Satisfied Customer

At Shoreditch Street Art Tours our total commitment is to give every guest a fantastic insight to the street art, the culture, the artists, the techniques and the history of the scene in Shoreditch. It works, clearly, ranking as a Top 20 London activity out of 502 on Tripadvisor does not lie!

One pair of guests from earlier this month have kindly taken the time and trouble to express their delight and satisfaction with their tour experience in a post on their blog, I think you should look at and enjoy the words of Rosie at Storm Brand Design, thanks Rosie and Rob.

Here is a selection of art on the particular route around Shoreditch that Rosie and Rob took with Shoreditch Street Art Tours.

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