London Clay by Tom Chivers

Author:Tom Chivers [Chivers, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

Skull

A BEARDED MAN IN CARHARTT jeans and a baseball cap is working on a complex calligraphic design. A small boy, whom I assume to be his son, sits cross-legged beside him in the gloom, rattling cans of spray paint. An Instagram model in an embroidered bomber jacket strikes a pose. One assistant holds up a portable light reflector, while another plays tinny pop music from her phone. A greenish light catches on her contoured cheeks. Further down, another artist makes wide gestures in fluorescent colours. He is wearing latex gloves, a white boiler suit and face mask, and has brought his own sound system: a vintage ghetto blaster.

Leake Street is where graffiti writers come to play without fear of penalty or arrest. Known colloquially as The Tunnel, it has been designated an ‘authorized graffiti area’, although a list of rules at the entrance does prohibit some practices (‘No Sexism. No Racism. No Adverts.’) Every surface is covered – even the wheelie bins outside the hip new restaurants that have appeared in the once abandoned archways. Cartoon characters – Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck – leap off the walls in primary colours, alongside Star Wars’ Jabba the Hutt and a fearsome samurai in the Japanese anime style. Scrawled tags – AREA 51, NURSE, GROPE, HOT OWCH – appear in the edges between garish throw-ups and complex compositions that must have taken weeks to paint: a green-eyed woman with an enigmatic smile; a huge black-and-white mural inspired by West African textile design; an ominous Tube train; a figure in a gas mask glaring down from the roof.

When I first explored the tunnel, back in 2013, it was practically deserted, but today I am joined by office workers clutching Styrofoam lunch boxes from the market on Lower Marsh and tourists posing for photos with their wheelie cases. A ‘Vietnamese tapas’ joint has opened in one of the arches, a ‘board game café’ in another. Coloured spotlights hang from metal trusses fixed to the roof. Autotuned R&B spills from one of the arches. Lambeth Council has even added Leake Street to its cleaning rota; a worker in hi-vis is carefully brushing the dirt from the gutter. I stop to photograph the coils of a giant snake that have been painted on the floor when something clips my elbow and a hooded figure on an electric scooter shoots past, swerving through the pedestrians at break-neck speed. I shout some obscenity, but he’s long gone. A group of lads in winter coats approaches in a cloud of vapour and I smell strawberries.

At the eastern end, the tunnel divides. On the left, a pedestrian ramp leads up and out of the tunnel, to the shops and cafés of Lower Marsh. On the right, the roadway plunges down and then turns sharply, into the light. I take this lower path, where a man in a denim jacket is spraying the outline – or ‘shell’ – of a new design directly over another. This practice is known as blocking, or

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.