Street art made the neighbourhood famous. Working out who is allowed to do it is a great deal more complicated
Who Owns a Shoreditch Wall? The Law, the Paint and the People With Ladders
On any dry Saturday, a slow river of people moves through the streets between Old Street and Brick Lane looking upward. They are following guides with lanyards. They stop at corners, raise their phones in unison and photograph a wall. Then they move to the next wall. Shoreditch must be one of the few places on earth where a visitor will walk straight past a listed church to take a picture of a shutter.
Street art is to this neighbourhood what the Tower is to Tower Hill. It is on the postcards and in the estate agents’ brochures. And yet, as a matter of strict law, a good deal of it should not be there at all. I have spent some weeks walking the walls and reading the rules, and the question of who is allowed to paint what, and where, turns out to be a small masterpiece of English muddle.
The Law Is Not Complicated
Let us begin with the easy part. Painting on a wall that is not yours, without the owner’s permission, is criminal damage under an Act of 1971. It does not matter whether the result is an obscenity or a thing of beauty. The law makes no allowance for talent. Councils have powers to remove graffiti and to require owners to remove it, and offenders can be fined or, for serious damage, sent to prison. The official position is summarised on GOV.UK.
With the owner’s permission, everything changes. A mural painted by agreement is simply decoration. This single distinction, consent, is all that separates a crime from a commission. On a Shoreditch street the two may sit a yard apart and look, to the passing tour group, exactly alike.
How the Walls Became Famous
The area’s reputation was made in the years around the turn of the century, when rents were low, warehouses stood empty and a generation of artists used the streets as a gallery. The most famous of them, Banksy, left a number of early pieces here, and work attributed to him in a yard off Rivington Street has long been preserved behind clear sheeting, which must be the only time a landlord has paid to protect the evidence.
Others followed and many stayed. The stick figures of the artist Stik, the giant birds and animals of the Belgian painter ROA and the bright shutter lettering of Ben Eine became local landmarks. People who moved here in those years will tell you, at length, that it was better then. They may be right. People have been saying it about Shoreditch since roughly 1598.
The Unofficial System
What grew up was a system of tolerance that no statute describes. Certain walls came to be understood as open. Certain owners let it be known that they did not mind. Shopkeepers invited artists to paint their shutters, partly because they liked the work and partly because a painted shutter is less likely to be scrawled on. There is an etiquette among the painters themselves about what may be covered and when, and it is taken seriously.
The councils, for their part, have had to exercise judgement. Shoreditch lies across the boundary of two boroughs, Hackney and Tower Hamlets, and both remove graffiti as a matter of routine. Both have also had the awkward experience of being criticised for painting over something that turned out to be valued. A cleansing crew with a roller cannot be expected to act as art critics, and from time to time a celebrated piece has vanished under a coat of magnolia.
Then the Advertisers Came
The most striking change of the last decade is commercial. Brands noticed that people photograph walls in Shoreditch and that a hand-painted mural does not look like an advertisement. Specialist firms now rent large walls from property owners and paint them, by hand, with campaigns for trainers, films, phones and drinks. The painters are skilled and it is fascinating to watch them work from a cradle four storeys up.
These murals count as advertisements and generally need consent under the planning rules that govern outdoor advertising, which is a different regime from the one for graffiti. Local artists have complained that walls which once changed every few weeks with new work are now booked months ahead by agencies. A wall is a finite resource. In this postcode it is priced accordingly.
Who Owns the Picture
There is a further tangle. An artist may own the copyright in an image while someone else owns the bricks it is painted on. Around the country, sections of wall bearing valuable work have been cut out and sold, to the dismay of the neighbourhoods that lost them and sometimes of the artist. The owner of the wall is generally entitled to do as he likes with it. Whether he ought to is another matter, and Shoreditch has strong views.
Does It Still Mean Anything
The sceptic’s case is that street art here has become a theme park attraction. The work is photographed by tourists, used by developers to sell flats and paid for by multinationals. An art form that began as trespass now comes with a guided tour and a discount code. There is truth in that.
But walk the back streets early on a weekday, before the tours, and the case looks weaker. There are still paste-ups that appeared overnight, small jokes at knee height, a doorway covered in stickers from every city in Europe. Somebody was up a ladder at four in the morning for no money at all. The uncommissioned work has not gone. It has been pushed to the edges, which is where it started.
My own view is that the muddle is the point. A neighbourhood that had settled the question, by banning everything or licensing everything, would be duller. Shoreditch has kept its walls interesting by declining to make up its mind. Heritage bodies have begun to consider when street art deserves protection, a debate that Historic England has engaged with, and I look forward to the first listed stencil with some curiosity.
The subject is well suited to mockery, and the London satirical news desk and The Daily Mash have both made merry with the Shoreditch creative. The British Onion page has more. If you read that a council has scrubbed off a priceless artwork and cannot tell whether it is a joke, the guide on how to tell satire from real news will help, though I warn you that it has happened. My other local reporting is on my author page at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/