Around the corner in Whitecross Street, Banksy’s Ratapult was thankfully intact but the small oil painted vegetable that appeared nearby a while back had developed a stalk and budding flowers, added by the original unknown artist. A bit of communication on flickr revealed that the plant has grown in stages and who says it has stopped growing?
Photos: top-NoLions; above-with kind permission of Unusualimage; right – HowaboutNo
At Blackall Street we came across a new paste-up by MJar that hadn’t been there the previous Friday. By the time we had admired the quality of the 2007 Swoon and Elbow Toe paste ups it was already apparent that the pace was slower than we had really allowed for.
We observed a great variety and quality of street art, the various techniques looked at included stencil, free hand spraypaint, paste up, rooftop roller jobs, shutter jobs, stickers and with thanks to the observational powers of our youngest vandal-to-be, mastic graffiti.
Among the new pieces we were able to spot were a rich collection of stencils by Asboluv, a Titifreak on Brick Lane and a well worked Dicky Smif on Pedley St.
Colours, smells and swear-words our graffiti neophytes were exposed to were produced by Apishangel (Nick Walker), Banksy, Kriebel, C215, Eine, Cartrain, Prefab77, Ace, K-Guy, Insect, Asbestos, Titifreak, Sickboy, Elbow-Toe, Rowdy, Elmo, Cyclops, Sweet Toof, Hera, Bortusk Leer, Swoon, Copyright, Mantis, Dicky Smif, The Krah and many many more than a sane person would want to be bothered with right now. The prolific international artist Unknown had also been pretty active.
Photo: HowAboutNo
We did miss out probably 3 key Shoreditch locations in an effort to end before darkness fell, one being the EndOfTheLine spot (think Eine’s Vandalism) which would have revealed the jaw dropping ultra fresh ATG paint job, another that twilight zone behind Curtain Street and also we missed the Banksy sniffing copper alleyway where we would have seen MJar at the top of his game doing a collection of his fantasy figures on a transparent paste-up.
Photo: HowAboutNo
Most of the week the wall in the Sclater Street car park is blocked by cars and vans but this Sunday evening we were able to catch Lister, Sickboy, Dscreet et al in stunning glory with the stench of piss and billowing market debris to lend true street ambience.
Eventually, we wound up in The Archers pub down at the bottom where Brick Lane turns into Osbourne Street, beer at £2.50 a pint suggested some kind of timewarp pricing kicking in. We bumped into MJar of all people who shared a pint (or two) and loads of cool stories about getting up and being involved over the past decade or so, the group was wowed by meeting someone whose street art had been seen on the walk. Coooool. All our exhausted perambulators received an envelope of stickers and cards collected (by Howaboutno and NoLionsinEngland, not by Cancer Sell) from street artists and shows over the past 6 months and in a particularly unusual form of lottery, two copies of Martin Bull’s Banksy Locations and Tours were given away.
We enjoyed sharing quite a lot of facts and no little bit of fiction with the group and as Cancer Sell remains a truly noble fundraising cause, we will dare to repeat the venture.
Another good reason to repeat is the wonderful efforts of this mob below whose self-perpetuating job-for-life is to prepare the blank canvas for our street art creatives, keep up the good work guys!