On Looking Up
I have been walking around with my head down.
This is the thought that strikes me while looking at the mural on Glenelg Road. It is preceded by a number of other thoughts – like ‘it’s massive!’ and – ‘how did she get that water to look so watery?’. But then I think: I have walked past here many times, and I have never noticed it before.
I arrived in Brixton two years ago, not knowing how long I would stay. This is my fourteenth home since I moved to London in 2003. Edgeware Road, Greenwich, Swiss Cottage, West Hampstead, Neasden, Bow, Balham, Balham, West Kensington, Sydenham, Shepherd’s Bush, (briefly) Brighton. Now Brixton. I know better, by this point, than to hang pictures or to plant bulbs that take whole seasons to germinate. I have been cautious of getting to know anywhere too well in case I miss it too much when I’m gone. I’m not complaining. This way of life hasn’t exactly been a choice, but it has, for the most part, suited me. Tugging up your roots over and over again, though – I know that it can’t be good for a living thing.
2020 changed everything. None of us lives now as we used to. My sphere tightened. For months I stayed confined to a two-mile radius of Brixton Hill. I have run around Brockwell Park so many times I know exactly which dogs I will bump into where, and approximately how big the signets on the pond have grown. I made friends with my neighbours, visiting those who were self-isolating with essential supplies, counting on the knowledge that, should I need it, one of them would do the same for me.
The fact that this is where I live has become unavoidable. And, like a person emerging from a sensory deprivation chamber, I have begun to notice things. I step out of my front door and marvel at the particulars of this place. Garlic and spices from someone’s kitchen on the evening air, the plums purpling on the trees in the community orchard. Then our circumstances changed and my partner and I decided that we will stay here long term, build our lives here. Brixton, after all this time, is the place that will end up being my home.
So: I’m trying to look up. Today’s self-guided walking tour of Brixton’s murals is part of this. It also relates to the research I’ve been doing over the past couple of years into the role of arts as a means of political resistance. My day job is as a theatre producer. In 2016, in the wake of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in America, I began to wonder about what role art can really play in contributing to fighting oppression and building a better world. Those questions have become more urgent in light of the pandemic. In a world on fire, should we really be giving our time to art? Or is it a frivolity; a distraction?
I’ve been trying to find an answer to these questions by learning about artists who have used their creativity as a means of political resistance. Before lockdown, my research took me to Sarajevo, to investigate the role played by the arts there during the long siege that took place in the nineties. And last January I spent three blustery weeks on Jersey, learning about Claude Cahun, an artist who launched a Surrealist resistance movement during the Nazi occupation in World War Two. Now, for obvious reasons, my focus is closer to home.
Murals have long been linked to political resistance. Many of Brixton’s arrived in the wake of the riots in 1981. Inevitably this year new ones have appeared. The map I’ve downloaded from TFL’s website features seven of them, but I reckon there are quite a lot more – I’ve identified at least sixteen – and what is a mural, anyway? Given how many of Brixton’s walls are covered in art of one kind or another, it’s hard to know where to start counting.
Christine Thomas painted the mural on Glenelg Road in 1985. Big Splash. It’s a scene that doesn’t look like it belongs in Brixton: a watery pastoral idyll full of a colourful menagerie of water birds. A watermill churns the river. Because it has a slight tromp l’oeil effect, my eyes are constantly shifting as I look at it. It’s impossible to settle into it, instead it seems alive, moving.
In the foreground a group of children is splashing about – portraits based on local residents. People peer out of the watermill, including one Brixton chap who was a competitor in the 1948 London Olympics. The mural is on the side of a residential building, and a window is incorporated into the image, suggesting whoever is in residence might poke their head out, becoming a part of the artwork themselves.
It isn’t an overtly political mural. Thomas had consulted with local residents, and – in the shadow of the Cold War and the Brixton riots - they’d asked for something rural, recalling a simpler time and place. I like it. A blue watery world I want to dive into. It looks clean and refreshing, on this muggy July day. Everyone seems to be having of fun.
As I loiter at the street corner opposite, staring up at it, I notice how easy it is for people to pass by it without looking up. But my intense gaze makes a few people glance over to see what I’m looking at. A dad with a toddler in tow stops next to me. “Hey, look at that!” he tells her.
***
Murals are the oldest kind of art we have. It has been at least 44,000 years since someone on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi painted, on a cave wall, miniature buffalos and wild pigs doing battle with strange part-animal, part-human figures. Those first murals were more modest than Thomas’s, but no less remarkable. When scientists discovered them they were astonished, because the murals told them that these distant forebears of ours already knew how to tell a story. A comprehension of stories - beginnings, middles and ends - is one of the things that sets us apart from animals. Stories contain heroes and villains, adversity that must be overcome. Which is to say, they contain politics.
During the 20th century, the connection between murals and politics was more explicit. Perhaps this was inevitable: mural painting, after all, is one of our most accessible art forms. You don’t need a curator to give you permission to make a mural, you just need access to a wall and some paint. And you don’t need to pay the entry fee of a museum or gallery to look at a mural either. You just need to be a person who looks up.
What do you do with a canvas this large? In Mexico, in the wake of the revolution that took place between 1910-20, some of the nation’s most prominent visual artists were hired by the Government to create murals that communicated the socialist values of the revolution to a society with low levels of literacy. Later, several of the muralists became critical of the Government in their works, recording the trauma of the revolution and filling their images with the cruelty and suffering of the conflict.
Murals were also part of the Civil Rights Movement in America. One of the most iconic was Chicago’s Wall of Respect, created in 1967 by the Organisation of Black American Culture. Measuring 20ft x 60ft, on the front of a derelict tavern, the mural portrayed a host of Black heroes who “honestly reflect(ed) the beauty of black life and genius in his or her style”. Activists, community leaders, sportspeople, writers and artists. The wall became a gathering place for political events, and evolved as the civil rights movement unfolded, new scenes being added. In 1971, the City of Chicago declared the site unsafe and razed it. But the memory of the wall has persisted, tied up in the story of the Civil Rights movement.
Of course, having access to a wall to paint is a more politically fraught business than I’ve implied. During The Troubles in Northern Ireland between 1968 – 1998, around 2000 murals appeared in Belfast and Derry. These confrontational images: balaclava-clad paramilitary fighters raising their AK47s; slogans declaring: ‘PREPARED FOR PEACE, READY FOR WAR’ - often delineated the boundaries of the Unionist and Republican communities who were in conflict. While there have been efforts to replace these since the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the violence, many remain.
Elsewhere, the partition wall built by the Israeli government around the perimeter, and encroaching into, the Palestinian West Bank, has become a canvas for the anger of the Palestinian people about the illegal occupation of their territory, and the oppressive circumstances they live within. When renowned graffiti artist Banksy began to create art on the wall, he drew the attention of the international media to the segregation being perpetrated by the Israeli Government. But a Palestinian friend has spoken of the Banksy murals with ambivalence. Banksy’s actions transformed the wall – which Israel’s Government claims offers security against terrorism, but Palestinians recognise as enforcing the illegal occupation of their land while effectively making the West Bank a prison - into a valuable artwork. He made it beautiful.
In Brixton, we have our own conflicts over walls – who inhabits them, and who has the right to tear them down.
***
One of Brixton’s earliest and best-known murals is the Nuclear Dawn mural, at the junction of Atlantic Road and Coldharbour Lane. Created by artists Brian Barnes and Dale McCrea and unveiled in February 1981, two months before the Brixton riots, it’s perhaps the most overtly political of Brixton’s murals. A skeletal figure four storeys high, striding across London, scatters nuclear missiles in its wake. In the background a vast purple fireball swells on the skyline, its shadow a contortion of agonised faces. But there is hope here too. A human hand reaches into the image, unleashing in the direction of the figure a dove, transforming as it flies into the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s peace sign.
Nuclear Dawn was created as part of a ‘mural movement’ that gripped London in the 1980s. Many of the prominent mural artists at the time had trained at high profile schools like the Royal College of Art, but they wanted to challenge the institution and step outside the politics of gallery systems. They were also motivated by a desire to mobilise communities, equipping them to use art as a means of expressing their political views. It’s obvious why murals appealed.
Nuclear Dawn didn’t stop the British Government implementing the Trident programme of nuclear missiles it had announced in 1980. Nor did it stop parliament voting for the renewal of the system in 2016. But the CND movement did achieve other victories. It was an important force in pressing the Government to sign a number of treaties preventing the use of nuclear weapons. Its campaigning against new hydrogen weapons prevented their implementation. And, crucially, to date, the British Government has never deployed Trident: public sentiment against the use of nuclear armaments is too great.
The Nuclear Dawn mural was part of that movement. The London Mural Preservation Society writes: “It represents our history of a shared experience and a reminder that war is not something we want. Sometimes when we don’t have a voice and we can’t shout loud enough, the murals speak for us.”
I know what the Nuclear Dawn mural looks like because I’m standing on the corner of Brixton Village Market, googling it. I hold my phone in up and try to overlay what is on my screen on to the landscape in front of me. The real thing is covered in scaffolding. Between the 1970s and 2014, this building, the Carlton Mansions, was a housing co-op, until the residents were evicted as part of plans for the Somerleyton Road development project.
This is the latest chapter in the ongoing story of change in Brixton. Even as a relative newcomer, I’m aware of how different Brixton is now to the place it was a decade ago. In the market, long established fruit and veg stalls and fishmongers stand adjacent to high end restaurants and bars. In 2016, numerous small businesses were evicted from the Brixton Arches for a planned refurbishment by Network Rail. Many will be unable to return due to the significant increase in rental prices.
The Somerleyton Road project, Lambeth Council’s website explains, will provide 304 new homes, 50% of them ‘affordable’, of which 121 will be let at social-rent levels. A school for chefs, a nursery, a local shop, a health hub and a new home for the community theatre Brixton House (formerly Ovalhouse) will also be built. The development scheme has, inevitably, caused anguish locally: people have been evicted from their homes, and questions have been raised about the extent to which original commitments to the provision of social housing will be met.
Perhaps this scheme has the potential to be different to many other development projects – rather than partnering with a private property development fund, the project is being implemented by a not-for-profit community benefit society called Brixton Green, who have been given a 250-year lease on the site by Lambeth Council. Anyone who lives in Brixton can pay £1 and become a member, voting on the decisions Brixton Green makes about the Somerleyton Road scheme. I try to join, but the online form isn’t working.
Carlton Mansions is being taken on by Brixton House, the new theatre that is part of the development, to provide studios and offices for creative organisations. They have offered reassurances that Nuclear Dawn will remain intact.
***
I have been writing a lot in lockdown. The words keep coming. I’m not alone in this outpouring of creativity. In recent months, everyone has been at it, one way or another - chalking hopscotch in the street, learning a musical instrument, baking sourdough, writing poetry, performing socially- distanced Shakespeare, planting things, joining online choirs, painting rainbows for the window, handcrafting signs to take to Black Lives Matter marches. In my street, someone strung a piece of rope to their fence, and my neighbours all pegged their artwork up, bright crayon sketches of their families and the local cat population.
This question I’ve been asking myself about whether, in the face of a national crisis, art has an important role to play. It’s the wrong question. Arts and creativity are a fact. We haven’t been without them since those Indonesian storytellers wove their tale of mythical animal-human hybrid superheroes taking on those wicked boars and buffalo. When we’re facing the darkest times, seemingly insurmountable circumstances, we don’t cast art out as a superfluous frivolity. We reach for it.
During the siege of Sarajevo, over 3000 cultural events are estimated to have taken place: an average of 2.5 per day. The people of the city may not have been able to get running water, electricity, or food, but they could catch a string quartet performing Mozart or watch La Vie de Bohème. 116 theatre productions had their premiere, two film festivals took place, and a brand new arts venue opened its doors. I met a theatre director in the city who told me he had empirical proof that art and culture are a basic human need, in the same sense as food and water. “The evidence is very simple,” he said. “It is not just that we had thousands and thousands of exhibitions, poetry and books. The proof is that we had audience for all this stuff. The theatres were full of people. When you come, you risk your life. Most of the people were killed in the streets. So any of those people who decided to take that risk, to go from his home, to go to some theatre performance, or any other artistic event, he is our proof.”
If we ignore art in discussions about political resistance, we risk ignoring something fundamental to the way we think and communicate ideas, or, worse, we risk giving up control to those who would use art not in the interests of progress, but to oppress us, grind us down. The question for those interested in political resistance is not – art, or not? But: what kind of art? How do we make use of it? We have to bring art to the struggle, because we have to bring every tool we have at our disposal.
***
A new mural has appeared during lockdown. From the side of Brixton Street Gym, against a pale green backdrop, Ty the Rapper gazes out at passersby, his eyebrow arched quizzically, the camouflage on his jacket a sea of green hearts.
Ty, born in 1972, was raised in Brixton, and went on to be a celebrated hip-hop star, nominated for the Mercury Prize for his album Upwards. “I COME FROM BRIXTON BABY!” reads the text alongside him, a line from his song, Brixton Baby. The music video is shot in the streets around here, a bright collage of all the shades of life that combine to make this place special: someone playing the clarinet, a drum circle, two boys doing judo in the park, a juggler, a raised Black Power fist.
The video ends with a quote from the philosopher Jean Vanier: “A community that is growing rich and seeks only to defend its goods and its reputation is dying. It has ceased to grow in love. A community is alive when it is poor and its members feel they have to work together and remain united, if only to ensure that they can all eat tomorrow!”
Ty died of Covid-19 on 7 May 2020, a virus that has disproportionately impacted upon Black people. A mural, very often, is a means of framing attention: of reminding a community of the stories that matter to it, the people it ought not to forget. In the foreground of the image, created by artist Carleen De Sözer, there’s Ty again, tipping back in his chair – he has tipped too far, he is falling, and emerging from his chest, a cluster of hearts are airborne. It is the cover art from his album A Work of Heart. What are these hearts doing? Are they spilling out from him? Or are they holding on, trying to prevent his fall?
I come from Brixton baby.
***
I sit down in the café on the corner of Atlantic Road to write. The coffee is strong, and the custard tart I eat is small, sweet and perfect. Even with strict social distancing in place, this café somehow manages to give off the aura of ‘bustling’. A group of young women is gossiping at a nearby table like it’s going out of fashion, and a couple at the counter are making the cautious small talk of an early date. The doors are open on to Atlantic Road, and the banter of the traders outside carries inside.
I am meant to be working on this essay about the relationship between arts and politics, about how the arts can be a means of activism, resistance. But all I can keep thinking about is my place here, in Brixton. How it is home now. These murals: they are part of how I’ll map my future. I’ll walk past them with friends and take pride in them, because they belong to my community. And perhaps, one day, I’ll explain to my children who Ty was and tell them about CND and point out that bloke in the upper window who, way back in 1948, competed in the Olympics. “Hey, look at that!”
Or maybe not. Maybe these murals will have disappeared by then, part of the flex and flux that gives this place its energy. Brixton is changing. I’m part of that change. I see the expensive bars full of white people who look just like me. And I know that me being here isn’t necessarily a good thing – that still hangs in the balance.
The decision to call a place home. It’s not just the business of where you live, but how you live. It is a responsibility, especially for a person like me, who has the privilege of choice. Political resistance begins at home, and it involves looking at your own heart, holding yourself accountable every day for the choices you make. What businesses do you go to? What causes do you support? How do you spend your free time? What petitions do you sign, protests do you show up for?
Do you walk around with your head down, or do you look up?