Rising out of the darkness of Liverpool Street Station we ascend into a pandemic stricken City of London, three days after (MOST) legal limits on social contact were removed. This was July 2021, the second summer of fear and lies. Bishopgate was like a dream (NO PEOPLE) slash post-apocalyptic nightmare (SCARED PEOPLE), masked, double-masked and afraid of themselves and Others, like us (NOT) wearing a face-covering and openly frolicking, happy and smiling with our gut feeling. The corner of Brushfield Street into Spitalfields empty of the usual corporate harbingers smoking through phone calls to secret lovers. Cluttering up the fucking place.
We continue eastward zig-zagging through (HANBURY, CORBET PLACE, GREY EAGLE & QUAKER STREET) meeting radicalised Bunnies, David Bowie (HANGING OUT IN A BLUE PHONE BOX), Blondie and Alice Cooper; they all talked of a living fissure of colour like a tear in reality on a sheltered footpath that connects Brick Lane to Cheshire Street via Allens Gardens. They sank back into the fabric of the city walls laughing in unison: I HOPE YOU’RE ENJOYING WEEK 271 OF THREE WEEKS TO FLATTEN THE CURVE.
We followed the heavy bass filling the air. Ancestral guardians marked the way to an energetic lightshow of colour in continuous motion; individual signature moves cavorting in friendly dance battles of choerographed sequences flipping and bending time and space. Stop following and you too might find stunning pinks, reds, purples, blues, oranges, silvers, yellows, greens and black scrawls, defined as irregular, possibly illegible handwriting. The unspoken fingerprints of the people undulating in defiance, raving to the sound of the pirate radio, ‘FUCK YOUR SYSTEM’.
IN PICTURES — Graffiti Scrawls, July 2021 Tower Hamlets, London, England.
