Cancer Sell Street Art Tour

The freezing temperatures and shitty smells of Hoxton, Shoreditch and Brick Lane are readily tolerated by vandals going about their clandestine work on walls so a little dank mist and a few squally showers weren’t going to deter a hardy group of walkers in search of graffiti enlightenment and soul purifying charity support.


Photo: HowAboutNo (all other photos NoLionsInEngland except where noted)

We headed first towards Clerkenwell where Nick Walker’s 11 day old Ratatouille was found to have been partly dogged, evidently in a petty fit of graff jealousy.

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!

Graffiti Solutions!

Our plans are probably to do another Sunday afternoon job in a month or so, and possibly also a couple of mid-week evenings. Keep ‘em peeled for further news and as usual, more pics here.

Charity Graf Walk

"Cancer Sell" is an event that is being staged to raise funds primarily from the contribution of art works given by the artists on Flickr. I am doing all I can to help out a friend that I met through the site to make the night and the fund raising total a big success. Thanks to all artists that have donated to the cause so far.

Two guys with no artistic talent, HowAboutNo and NoLionsInEngland, both of whom have a penchant for clocking street art, will do their bit for this good cause by organising a graffiti tour of the streets around Shoreditch, Hackney, Brick Lane and various dubious but possibly interesting spots in between.

The plan is to guide a group of 20 or so people up and down the streets providing a commentary on the art there and possibly art that used to be there – depending on whether the council buffer squads have been particularly vigilant the night before. We hope to describe some of the different approaches to getting up used by different artists and describe from second hand knowledge some of the issues faced by graffiti artists in going about the clandestine activities.



We will also throw in a bag of freebies – mainly stickers and postcards, depending on what we have scraped together. There will also be 5 copies of the book "Banksy Locations & Tours" by Martin Bull available to some lucky punters, we havent decided what you need to do to get one as of yet, bet when we probably end the tour in or very close to a pub I'm sure we will think of something ;)



The aim isn't to replicate the legendary Banksy Tours of 2006 (mainly because there are so few Banksy's left in the area!) But we will probably be checking some spots from those tours. There is even a possibility Martin, the author of BLT may aid and abet on one or other of the jaunts.

We expect to see some Banksy pieces, it all depends on what's still up.
The tours will take place whatever the weather is like.

Here's the deal:

First - pick your date – Sunday April 20 or Sunday April 27.

Then email your name name, preferred dates and how many places you want to nolionsinengland *at* gmail.com

When lists fill (hopefully!) we will email you requesting payment. Payment will be by paypal to a paypal account set up for the Cancer Sell fundraising monies.

We will confirm the meeting point about 2 or 3 days prior to the walk. This gives us some flexibility to customise the route according to what's around.

Cost will be £10 per person, all of which goes into the Cancer Sells coffers.

Many thanks and we look forward to hearing from you.

HowAboutNo! www.flickr.com/photos/howaboutno
NoLionsInEngland www.flickr.com/photos/11928372@N04/