Small, temporary lines of verse that wash away in the next decent rain, appearing regularly for over a year with no explanation. I finally found out who, and why.
For well over a year now, small fragments of chalk poetry have been appearing periodically on the pavement near my flat, a few lines at a time, gone within days once the weather does its work, and I finally managed, after some genuinely patient neighbourhood detective work, to track down the person responsible and hear the actual story behind it.
It turns out to be a local resident, someone who has lived on the street for over a decade, who started the practice initially as a small, private way of processing a difficult period in her own life, finding that writing something down in a temporary, semi-public form and then simply letting it wash away felt genuinely more useful than keeping a private journal that never actually got read by anyone.
What began as a private coping mechanism has, entirely without her deliberately intending it, become something the street has quietly adopted as its own small tradition, neighbours now checking that particular stretch of pavement the way you might check for post, genuinely curious what the next fragment might say.
She told me she has no plans to ever formally reveal herself as the author more broadly, and asked that I keep specific identifying details out of this piece, a request I’m genuinely happy to honour, since the anonymity itself seems central to what makes the whole small ritual work as well as it does for her and for the street.
I walked away with a real, renewed appreciation for exactly this kind of quiet, unbidden generosity, a small private practice shared with an entire street purely by accident of location, asking nothing back beyond the simple, temporary act of being noticed before the rain inevitably comes.
For more on London’s broader tradition of small-scale, anonymous public art, see News Satire Sites.
More from this author at Harper-Thames, prat.uk.