From Downtown to Main Street: The Hidden World of London's Street Art

By Beth Rehman
Beth Rehman is filling in for Kelly Raftery this Tuesday on the topic of street art.

Beth Rehman lives with her family in sunny Singapore. She has already lived her fair share of nine lives—in the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, and now along the equator. After a career in financial services, Beth is now working on a novel. She also enjoys being a mother as well as the new president of the German European School Singapore. 

My friend, Judy, returned from London this summer with an interesting tale about street art. She had visited her daughter for a weekend, and they decided to take a different type of city tour. Judy’s daughter had booked a walking tour with an outfit called Street Art London Tours. This group of street artists lead walking tours around the streets of London’s East End.

The girl in this photo was painted
by her parents.  She carries on the
family tradition, creating small
works of her own.

The tour took place in and around Brick Lane, and the guide gave detailed background on each of the pieces and the artists they visited. There were several striking pieces, which Judy shared with me.

The group saw a number of unique and striking paintings, when they looked carefully enough. Reminiscent of the children’s novel, The Borrowers, these little figures were tucked away along door frames or between other paintings. They are little treasures you feel lucky to spot. I won’t show you more photos; you’ll just have to visit London and find them yourselves. 

Many cities now offer such street art tours, and it is a lovely way to get to know a new town in a different way. Not so much as a tourist, but as one of the locals, familiar with the streets themselves but now taking the time to notices their little treasures.

Street art began as “tagging” in New York and other big cities. People wrote their initials or gang signs inside unusual places such as subway cars to signify their presence there. The movement evolved and began encompassing different purposes—tagging for its own glory, graffiti to mark gang territory, street art for self-expression and beautification—but all of these forms had their roots in spray-painting walls, trains, and doorways.

A Belgian artist named Roa painted
this crane in only nine hours.

Today, street art has moved indoors. But the tour Judy and her daughter took led them straight to the streets where artists create the art as well as guide visitors through these communities. This is what street art was meant to be—a form of artistic expression that is accessible to everyone—for both the artist and as well as the art appreciator. The art is not hidden behind closed doors, creating a barrier between you and it. Instead, it lives and breathes. And then is washed away again by the rain and elements, only to be replaced by something fresh and new in the future. Ephemeral. Transient. Having its own time and place, but not meant to last forever.

Now cities are displaying street art in gallery exhibits, and such buyers as Wall Street traders and officials with the City of London are buying street art on canvas. Why? Because they are looking for a good investment. Or maybe, like many of the artists, they too have come from these local streets and identify with the artwork?

Judy’s guide painted these screaming faces,
which gave the tour a very personal feel.

This move to bring street art into the mainstream—Main Street, as the case may be—means that artists who previously worked furtively at night, rushing to complete their masterpieces before sunrise can now create their artworks at leisure.  No longer walking on the wrong side of the law, artists no longer fear showing their faces in public and can proudly display their works in galleries.

Perhaps this movement indoors is a good thing. This change has given non-traditional artists a way to break into the mainstream and be recognized as the talented artists they are. But, somehow, I cannot help but think that the street art movement may have lost a big of its edginess and spontaneity in the process.

The next time you are in a new city, see if you can find a local street art tour. It may just give you a new perspective on your holiday destination—or perhaps even of your own home town. Seeing the art in its natural habitat is a bit like seeing a wild animal while on safari versus in a cage at the zoo.

So, take a stroll through new streets and look around you. Enjoy the show!

Painting the Town—Tehran’s Street Art

By Heidi Noroozy

When I’m in Tehran, leaving the house without my camera would be as unthinkable as stepping onto the street without a scarf and manteau, the tunic every woman is required to wear for proper Islamic modesty. The city is filled with the most fascinating snippets of life, exotic to me if not to the locals, and I’d hate to miss an opportunity to capture them.

On my most recent visit to Iran last spring, I sometimes abandoned my usual dynamic subjects of daily life in favor of the city’s painted walls. Murals are everywhere in Tehran, alongside highways, on public buildings, tucked away in hidden alleys. Some carry political or religious messages while others are simply pretty works of art. Many are serious, a few whimsical. But all add color to a city that is often gray and drab.

Let me take you on a quick tour of my favorites (so far). We’ll begin at the edge of Sayeh Park, a green space in the heart of Tehran’s Shemiran district, just blocks away from my in-laws’ home. I love to walk here, and any excursion means checking out the murals along Vali Asr Avenue. The most delightful work of art is this house, which is painted to look like…well…a house, complete with windows, doors, and even flowers in bloom:

Here’s a detail of a painted-on window box filled with spring flowers.

Whenever I pass this charming house, I half expect a hobbit to emerge, tip his hat, then invite me in for tea, quite forgetting I’m in the Islamic Republic and not Middle Earth.

Farther down, across the street from Book City, my eye is drawn to a lovely painting that stretches all the way up a wall.

The first time I saw it, from a distance, the bright colors and geometric shapes captured my attention, and it took me a moment to realize the people were moving. I’d thought they were part of the two-dimensional scene. In fact, the artwork decorates the side of a staircase that leads from Vali Asr Avenue to a street higher up on the hill.

Nearby, on the same side of the road, this piece of modern art stretches nearly an entire block. It’s not actually a mural but a mosaic, the motif created from thousands of colored tiles.

In Tehran, I always spent a great deal of time sitting in traffic on clogged roads and highways, an inevitable aspect of any trip to this sprawling city. On my recent visit, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: a lovely mural along the southbound lane of the Modares Highway. Now that a long stretch of Vali Asr Avenue is one-way northbound, this highway is the most direct way to reach my in-laws’ house from my favorite bazaar in Tajrish.

I like to think this mural was set in place to give people something pretty to look at while sitting impatiently in the inevitable traffic jams.

                

Another roadside painting occupies the entire side of a skyscraper:

We passed this building early one evening as dusk was falling, and the bright red spots are reflections of taillights traveling along the road. The patterns decorating the hands caught my attention, and I first thought they looked like the henna designs that traditionally adorn the hands of Indian women. But on closer inspection, I realized they are formed by calligraphy, miniature versions of the larger writing in the image’s center. The messages written here tell the story of Imam Hossein, the 7th-century Shia leader who was beheaded and martyred in Karbala (in present-day Iraq) during a battle between Shia and Sunni Muslim armies.

Occasionally, I’ve found murals in the most unexpected of places, like this one that literally adds a ray of (painted) sunshine to its neighborhood.

The charming scene decorates the side of a school at the end of a narrow alley off Jomhouri Eslami Street, right across from the red brick complex that houses the British Embassy (closed since 2011). Birds are a common element in these kinds of murals, and the two girls are wearing a typical school uniform—a long tunic worn over pants and a contrasting hood called a magna’eh.

Each time I return to Tehran, it seems that more of these colorful paintings have sprung up since my previous trip. So you can be sure that on my next visit—maybe this year, maybe next—I’ll be wandering about, camera in hand, eyes peeled for more lovely street art.