Leake St redevelopment scheme (artist’s impression)
The Leake St graffiti tunnel round the corner from my flat is one of my favourite places in the world. It’s the only place I know of in London that is safe, accessible and available for literally anyone to use to make art, entirely on their own terms, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Now they want to redevelop it. Of course.
Not wholesale – the site will still, we’re told, be available for use by graffiti artists. It will just have a bunch of cafés and restaurants in it too. So it will no longer be that vanishingly rare thing, a central London site at artists’ disposal around the clock.
To be fair, Network Rail (who own Leake St) deserve a huge amount of credit for allowing the tunnel to flourish as a radically free site of self-expression for the past seven years, since Banksy’s Cans Festival in 2008. It’s not their job to promote art and community and it’s brilliant that they have chosen to do so.
And it’s hardly a surprise that they’d start looking at this site given its prime location near a bunch of mammoth redevelopment projects in the works around Waterloo.
And if you were tasked with developing the commercial potential of the Leake St graffiti tunnel, you could do a lot worse than this proposal, which you can read all about here. It involves adding eight storefronts in the arches in the northern half of the tunnel and linking through to Addison Rd. Much of the rest of the tunnel will apparently be left as is, at least for the time being.
The people involved in the project obviously know what a gem Leake St is and seem to have put genuine thought into mitigating the inevitable damage caused by such development to the purity of the graffiti tunnel as a site of free self-expression.
But goddamit, why should we have to resign ourselves to the idea that all such places are ultimately expendable? Why is it always “realistic” for public space to move away from creativity, culture and community and towards commerce?
Imagine the reverse situation – a big retailer deciding to give over a significant percentage of its floorspace for artists to use – and try not to laugh at the absurdity of the idea.
There is such a thing as a place that would not be improved by the addition of shops or cafés, and Leake St is such a place.
If you’re interested in the nitty-gritty, below you will find what I wrote to Soundings, the “community consultation facilitators” handling the project for Network Rail. You can let them know your thoughts about it via this form by Friday July 24. I’ve illustrated my submission with pictures I’ve taken in the tunnel just in recent weeks.
Dear Soundings,
For more than a decade, I have lived a few minutes from Leake Street and I walk through the graffiti tunnel multiple times a week – sometimes multiple times a day. It’s no exaggeration to say it is my favourite thing about living here. I don’t claim to have expertise in architecture or planning, or in graffiti and street art, come to that. But I have expertise in living in Waterloo, and I know what brings me joy, and that is the perspective from which I am writing.
Leake St is an oasis. It is the only place I know of in London that is a safe, accessible site available for literally anyone to use to make art entirely on their own terms, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is a constantly changing, constantly surprising, constantly enlightening joy – a gallery, a gazette, a conversation, a community, full of laughter and anger and intimacy and argument. Every day it offers a museum’s worth of culture and anthropology in its layers of paint and meaning. On some days, you will see works that stop you in your tracks with their power and sophistication.
I love the graffiti tunnel most of all for its purity. That might sound like a strange word to use about a rough, messy, dingy passage that is sometimes strewn with dead cans or rubble and occasionally smells of piss. But it is a pure place. It has a purity that is vanishingly rare in our city these days. Along with the Southbank skate park (which was saved from commercial redevelopment), Leake St is pretty much the only central London space I can think of that is entirely given over to individual and collective self-expression beyond the control of the market or the state. Like the skate park, it is loved locally and known worldwide. That it has been operating in this way for seven years is a small miracle and Network Rail is to be praised to the sky for making it happen.
When I first saw these redevelopment plans, then, my heart sank. I knew it was probably only a matter of time until development came knocking – given the tunnel’s location and the huge new developments about to rise on York Rd, the owners were bound to take notice and consider their options. And it’s not like Network Rail is under any legal obligation to provide a free graffiti space. All the same, it seemed that the days were now numbered during which I could enjoy the exceptional privilege of living with this pure space on my doorstep, and my heart sank.
There is such a thing as a place that would not be improved by the addition of shops or cafés, and Leake St is such a place.
Clearly, then, I would be disposed against any scheme that compromises Leake St’s status as a radically free and unaccountable site of self-expression. Taking that for granted, I do not reject out of hand the idea that a redeveloped Leake St could still be a net good for the area, and have looked with interest at all the information made available about this proposal. I found some things that were welcome within the terms of such a scheme, not least the fundamental recognition of the distinctive value of the graffiti tunnel and its importance to the local community, which has clearly informed stated aspirations such as working with graffiti artists and using materials in keeping with the existing environment. Other aspects of the scheme I found more disconcerting.
The plans declare an intention to “protect the established tradition of free graffiti painting within the tunnel” and to preserve the graffiti as a “key element”. This in itself is welcome, as I say. Yet I find it disingenuous to claim that “the graffiti walls will stay as they are” while also proposing to “activate street frontages” by creating eight retail units along the northern half of the tunnel. It’s hard to see how this could be compatible with the site’s continued round-the-clock use as a graffiti canvas.
Consideration has clearly been given to mitigation of this, for instance by setting unit entrances back from the tunnel “to make sure that artists can continue to work throughout the day”. But has this idea taken into account potential issues related to spray-can emissions in a busy retail environment offering food and drink – let alone the inevitable disruption to artists as they work? What if business owners don’t like the graffiti painted on or near their site, or the artists playing music? And are there plans to open up more spaces in other parts of the tunnel?
I don’t share the scheme’s implicit confidence that the arches along Leake St would be of greater value to the community as occupied spaces rather than continuing to be made available for constant use by graffiti artists. However, if they were to be used in that way, I think some occupants would be more problematic than others. Chain retail, for instance, would be simply disastrous and utterly antithetical to the scheme’s stated aspiration “to build on the unique character and creativity of the place”.
But nor do I understand the scheme’s repeated prioritisation of “new cafes, restaurants, cafes or bars” (so many cafés!). Food and drink are not distinctive in themselves and there are plenty of places offering them in the immediate and wider local area. The scheme declares its aspiration to build on current uses such as the Vaults and House of Vans – yet they are spaces for culture and creativity. How does it build on those uses to provide yet more places to get a latte?
Sure, small independent cafés who are up for working with street artists would be a bit nicer than Pret or Starbucks, but such opportunities would be available to only a fraction of those who use the tunnel, if they even wanted them. And there is a significant difference between a space that is free for all to use without prejudice, and view without obligation, and an arrangement to display works within or provide decoration for a commercial unit. It’s hard, then, to see how restaurants, cafés and bars could offer a cultural or community benefit to the area on a par with the graffiti space they would be replacing.
In fact, I would argue that commercial use per se is inimical to the site’s current use – that’s why “no adverts” is one of the rules of the tunnel. If the spaces are to be taken out of 24/7 use for art, they should be put to use for other things benefiting the community and/or promoting culture: spaces for the use of artists, disabled, unemployed and young people without access to resources; spaces for teaching or community advice; galleries, performance venues and other sites in which self-expression is the main point, not an optional bolt-on.
The plan also goes to some lengths to describe the supposed need for a “safer” environment in Leake St. Speaking from personal experience, I have never found safety to be an issue in the graffiti tunnel and I would not be made to feel safer by the addition of yet more CCTV cameras, as the scheme proposes, but less comfortable. I don’t, of course, equate my experience with everyone else’s so I would be curious to hear about specific ways in which safety is presently an issue of concern. What actual incidents indicative of an unsafe environment have you come across, and is the rate of these higher in Leake St than in other parts of the surrounding area?
My concern here is that in the absence of evidence of genuine safety concerns, the scheme arguably proposes an unwarranted association between graffiti and danger – an association that is at best thoughtless and at worst risks inflaming prejudice.
It might also be nice if, in future artists’ impressions of the scheme, not every person shown was young, white and able-bodied. Just a thought.
As I mentioned above, my interest in the graffiti tunnel is as a resident and enthusiastic viewer of graffiti. I certainly wouldn’t presume to speak for the best interests of the graffiti artists themselves and it is very welcome that the proposed scheme involves consulting and working with graffiti artists and street artists. I’d be curious to know which artists you have spoken to, how you got in touch with them, and what specific concerns and opportunities have been discussed, with what results. In many ways, the priorities of the artists who use the tunnel are the most crucial of all, and I hesitate to form any fixed opinion about the site’s development without knowing their thoughts.
I have described here my own concerns arising from my examination of the material you have provided about the scheme. Thank you for making that material available, and thank you too for the obvious consideration that has gone into this scheme in terms of mitigating the inevitable damage caused by such development to the purity of the graffiti tunnel as a site of free self-expression.
And thank you as well to Network Rail for allowing this miracle to flourish in my neighbourhood over the past eight years. For what it’s worth, I would urge them to think very carefully about undertaking any scheme that would bring such a unique and joyful part of London’s grass-roots cultural fabric to a premature end.
