Leake Street

On Wednesday 30th November me and my group went to London to seek out a few locations that we could use in our shoot. We went to a few of the obvious places being all along Southbank and The London Eye and had a few ideas with these locations, explained in the next post. This post however is about a street that runs underneath the tracks and platform of Waterloo Station. The street is called Leake Street. Many people may know this as the 'Banksy Tunnel'. The walls are decorated with graffiti initially created during the 'Cans Festival' organised by Banksy himself. The graffiti along Leake Street is tolerated by the authorities especially as there is a claim that it is a legal wall. Below is a board of pictures that we took when we went to Leake Street to show the types of art that can be found there as well as what the tunnel actually looks like.


As you can see, the tunnel is literally covered in graffiti. There is literally not one brick below head height that can be seen. As I have said above, the picture above shows what type of art can be found. This is because the street was originally for artists to leave their work for others to see, but as you can see from the picture, this concept has been abused, probably by youths that just want to go out spraying walls because they think it is legal. A lot of the original art has been destroyed by peoples 'tags' and other art, such as the smiley face and the grey face that you can see in the mood board. When we were walking around the street, we noticed how one of the bits of graffiti said 'Life'. This gave us the idea to possibly spray our own line on the wall and film it to use in our video. we would like to have the line 'what a life' on the wall.

As well as the covered walls, the street itself was fairly busy and this is what we wanted for some shots of the video. We did not want our performer to perform somewhere with no people around at all.