09-15 MARCH 2020 BIGISSUE.COM | p 27
“When we started Global Street Art it felt
like a lot of artists were just looking for a place
to paint, and they were struggling,” he says.
“You had a city that wanted to be painted, and
artists that wanted to paint it, but there was
just this one thing missing in the middle, and
that was just a conversation. The artists are
doing 99.9 per cent of the hard work – actually
painting the walls – but if we could get good
at the permission bit then it would mean a
lot more art could happen. Hopefully London
Mural Festival will lead to lots of good murals.”
More than 300 artists have applied to take
part and the festival will see more than 20
large-scale murals put up across London, with
the Czech and Hungarian cultural centres
already signed up. It will even bring artists over
from their own countries to take part. Street
art will spring up on estates and building sites
across London, but the organisers will also put
up temporary vinyl surfaces so they can paint in
areas they would never normally get access to,
with walls in Paternoster Square, sandwiched
between St Paul’s Cathedral and the London
Stock Exchange, already confi rmed.
Meanwhile the Swiss embassy has made
its own o�fering, a�ter o�fi cials agreed to open
up their doors and allow visitors to come and
see more than 20 Banksy works hidden in the
car park.
“It all came from a raucous party held by the
previous ambassador,” Bo�kin says. “He was
very progressive and he invited a bunch of
street artists into the car park to paint the
walls there. They have stayed there, but not
visible to the general public for 20 years.
They’re all in pristine condition, and the Swiss
embassy has agreed that for one day during
the festival there will be a limited number of
public tickets available for people to go and
see. Due to security concerns you won’t be able
to photograph them, but there will hopefully
be a guided walk to take you through how that
happened back then.”
With so many pieces of art – some
temporary, some permanent – the festival will
bring a form o�ten associated with subculture
to a much wider audience. And while there has
o�ten been a sort of stigma or snobbishness
attached to street art, Bo�kin has seen a huge
change in attitudes over the last few years.
“The perceptions of the general public have
changed a lot,” he says. “Folks are generally
more open to it. Councils as well – Camden isreally progressive and Waltham Forest, they
really understand the power of working with
art and murals. We’ve had some really good
conversations with councils like Southwark
and Haringey and Sutton, and we get enquiries
from people even from Redbridge. Then
there are some other ones which are further
behind, but they’ll catch up eventually. Things
are changing.
“It’s a weird thing because this isn’t supply
and demand, it’s demand and demand. The
more walls you paint, the more people see it
and the more they get used to it, and the more
people then want to see it a�terwards. It just
becomes part of their fabric. It’s the di�ference
between an economic good and a shared good- with economic goods like money, or a mobile
phone, or your lunch, if you’ve got it and you
own it, I can’t. But with public art, everyone
shares that together.”
He just needs more walls.
London Mural Festival runs from
September 1-13
londonmuralfestival.com
@HolyroodLiam