The words appeared overnight on a new local café. “NOTHING’S REAL,” it said in spray-painted letters two feet high. The café owner, who had remade this wall with its original Victorian bricks, was incensed. “Building a new business from scratch on four hours’ sleep a night,” she wrote on Instagram, “is real.” Neighbours helped her scrub away the words.
Graffiti provokes strong emotions. Driving through Camberwell last winter, it seemed suddenly to be everywhere. You can’t be too precious in inner London. You expect scribble on bus shelters or over shop shutters. Sometimes in a nothing place, like a grim underpass or a railway arch, a piece of street art makes the city feel vividly alive.
But this was different. On a parade of restaurants, nail bars, estate agents and hairdressers, every business was defaced. Graffiti was on walls, over windows, across shop signs. This wasn’t the hipster nihilism (with its correct apostrophe!) that blighted the café, but tags, those one-word logos, the tom-cat piss-spray that says nothing more than “I am here” and, since many denote a gang’s turf boundaries, “keep out or else”.
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It isn’t just the ugliness or the knowledge that some struggling restaurateur spent a fortune making their frontage welcoming only to see it ruined. It’s how it makes you feel about your neighbourhood: that it’s in decline, that you’re no longer safe, that if unseen hands can daub your corner shop with impunity, they may be emboldened to do worse things to you — and no one will stop them.
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Local government follows an agreed standard, NI195, which states that if you stand anywhere in a borough you shouldn’t see graffiti more than 5 per cent of the time. What I’d observed in Camberwell was this had crept up — the council says to almost 10 per cent — a hangover of lockdown where streets were deserted, but also a change in council policy.
With budgets tight, Southwark had stopped cleaning graffiti off businesses for free. When they had to pay, many didn’t bother, since it’s costly to remove and only came back. So, like Japanese knotweed, it proliferated, until the council relented and now once more removes it for free.
I meet Liz Moffat outside an abandoned building, once the premises of a rather foppish estate agent. Liz, a Superking-smoking Glaswegian grandmother who worked her way up from road sweeper to head of street cleaning services, has been up since 5am. To show me how bad things get if unchecked, her team hasn’t touched this shopfront for three months. It’s plastered in tags, fly posters and “Free Palestine” scrawled in sharpie pen.
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Liz notes the trends: “We used to get a lot of ‘F* Boris’.” I ask why graffiti matters when many say it’s just part of urban life. “There are very nice people living round here,” she says. “And it matters to them. I just think it makes the place look dirty.” What would she say to the spray-painters? “You couldn’t print that.” So you’re Batman cleaning up Gotham? She smiles and tells me that when designer Stella McCartney ran her “It’s about f*ing time” poster campaign she had her guys paint over the f-word.
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The graffiti crew arrive — Lloyd, 74, born in Jamaica, and Wayne, an Islington Cockney — to show me how hard it is to remove. First they treat the writing on a brick wall with a mix of ethanol, white spirit and caustic soda, leave it to soak, then spray with a hot water pressure hose. If graffiti is on a fence, they paint over it.
“Lloydie,” says Wayne, “has all these cans in his van and blends them up to match the colour exactly. It’s his idea — no one else does that.” Lloyd looks bashful: “I just like to do a good job.” The crew are also responsible for hosing away human faeces (mainly from local drug addicts) and the blood from stabbings (“which gets all horrible and congealed in the summer”). But they are also ghostbusters.
“Ghosting” is when, despite cleaning, you can still see the outline of the words. They treat this with “Ghost Liquid” (mainly potassium hydroxide) but even this doesn’t always work since the taggers have started mixing paint with acid so it etches deep into bricks and ruins glass.
I ask if they ever find the work futile and they recall spending four days applying 20 gallons of paint to an alley in Peckham, which was immediately retagged. In some urban space graffiti is part of the vibe and local artists are encouraged to paint murals that the taggers respect, at least for a while. Maybe we should commission kids to paint designs on metal shutters, like the portraits of Maradona or Messi you see in the tougher bits of Buenos Aires.
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Except not all of them yearn to be the next Banksy. The prolific tagger 10 Foot, the bane of Liz’s life since he sprayed higher than her crews can reach, was jailed in 2010 for criminal damage after scrawling on public buildings from the Hebrides to London Bridge.
The freedom to paint anywhere, however dangerous, is part of the allure. Tagging is about making your mark on the world, whether the world wants it or not. About a mile from Camberwell, three taggers were killed in 2019, hit by a train on a railway bridge. “Rest in Paint,” graffitied their mates. Like 10 Foot — aka Sam Moore, a doctor’s son — they were young, middle-class white men.
Lloyd, soon to retire after 25 years to a little place he’s bought in Jamaica’s Discovery Bay, tells me not a day goes by without someone thanking him: “Graffiti was upsetting them, and we made it go away.” The scarier the world gets, the more important that your tiny part of it feels under control. Nothing’s real, until you’re fighting for what you love.
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