Street Art

I was downloading photos from our camera and came across these from a visit to London at the beginning of July. While visiting family we took a trip to the Tate Modern which is holding an exhibition of street art. The facade of the building which faces the Thames has these huge images, three or four storeys high - as you approach the Tate across the Millennium Bridge it looks really impressive. As well as the 6 images on the building itself you can also take a walking tour around the local area where a series of works have been commissioned (with the support of the owners of the of the walls that have been painted!).



I really like street art, as opposed to graffiti - a fine line I know, but I always think of it as something that shows a bit more thought than just spraying your name on any blank space you find. Before we launched Alder and Alder we lived in London. The company I worked for was based on the edge of Shoreditch, so the surrounding streets were home to a lot of Banksy's work. It brightened up some fairly drab streets - it's always good to see something that makes you smile on the way to work. There was one about 10 metres from the door of our office - the Apache helicopters with the pink ribbons. It's been painted over now. The barbers I went to - Johns Hairdressers on Old Street, run by a Greek guy called George - had the Pulp Fiction scene with John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson, with the guns replaced by bananas, on a wall above it. That's been painted over too. You can buy a kind of guide book now, that lists the sites of some of his work and shows it when it was fresh, and then what state they're in now - mostly painted over or faded away. We've got a Banksy print in our office - the chimp with the sandwich boards - on the wall facing the door, and it does make me smile. Even though I see it everyday.

So with that in mind, when we saw these hoardings around a building site next to the Tate Modern we wondered why more developers don't take a similar approach.