Street Art | Postcards From Here and There

Liverpool Street Art 1

There are three broad areas where street art can currently be found in the city.

The Baltic Triangle. I have previously posted about the art in the area and you can read about it here
The eastern end of area between London Road and Islington.
Oldham Place, which is located off Roscoe Street, between Mount Pleasant and Leece Street.

In this, the first of two posts, I will focus on the area around London Road. The streets here are rarely vivid by tourists to the city. It is a good half an hours walk from the waterside at Pier Head. It is an area undergoing development and many of the art pieces on Dover Street are to be found on the wooden hoardings that surround a construction site. It is likely therefore that they won’t be around for very long, illustrating perfectly the temporary nature of much street art.

The majority of the works in this area were created as part of the Contrast Mural Festival which was held in the city in the spring of 2018.

London Road

The side of Lord Warden public house and the area adjacent is where you will find these two works.

Bayhorse Lane

Constance Street

Both Burnon and Emily Gray also have works in the Baltic Triangle on Greenland Street and New Bird Street respectively.

Gildart Street

Dover Street

The message here is catch it while you can. All the art is surrounding a construction site.

East Side Gallery Berlin

The East Side Gallery is a 1.3 Km stretch of the Berlin Wall in the former East Berlin district of Friedrichshain. For visiting, the nearest S-bahn stations are Ostbanhof and Warschauer Straße. This preserved section of wall has become an open air gallery with over 100 paintings which are free to view 24 hours a day. Work here began in 1990, shortly after the fall of the wall, and involved over a hundred different artists from all over the world. The paintings are actually on what would have been the east side of the wall although the actual border between East and West Berlin was the nearby River Spree. The reverse side of the wall is covered in graffiti which makes for an interesting contrast.

Over the years since their creation many paintings have been affected by weathering, graffiti and even vandalism. As a result restoration work has been undertaken.

The gallery can get very busy as it is one of the top tourist attractions in the city. We got there around 9.30am and it was relatively quiet but coaches started to arrive from around 10 o’clock and there was then much competition for photographs.

For this post words are not really necessary. I’ll let the works speak for themselves. Note that some of the photos only show sections of a much larger work.

The Persistence of Ignorance – Karsten Wenzel

Thank You Andrej Scharow – Dimitri Vrubel

Diagonal Solution of the Problem – Michail Serebrjakov

My God, Help Me Survive Amid This Deadly Love – Dimitri Vrubel

Baltic Triangle Street Art

The Baltic Triangle is to be found about a 20 minute walk from Liverpool city centre. It is not blessed with great public transport but a taxi from the city centre should cost less than £5. In the heyday of Liverpool as a shipping port this area was awash with warehouses, some of which remain today. Clearance and redevelopment has now resulted in the variety of architectural styles. It is very much an area of contrasts from the modern to Victorian to derelict. Its what makes it such an interesting area and a perfect backdrop for street art.

Much of the art that can be viewed today can be found on the streets around Jamaica Street including; Greenland, Newhall, Cramp, New Brick and Jordan Streets.

The old skateboard park on Jamaica Street is perhaps the most obvious example but is a large number of works in a small area. Further along Jamaica Street is Paul Curtis’s work of Liver Bird wings

The Liver Bird is the symbol of the city and can be found atop of the Liver Building at the Pier Head. The Liver Birds. The Liver Birds was a TV comedy in the 1970s set in the city and featuring the life of two local women sharing a flat together, hence the dedication!

Its interactive art as you can become the none to wear the wings. There is even a crown to rest on your head as you stand between the wings.

There area number of other pieces on the same stretch of wall.

Street Art is an opportunity to make a point and here the piece makes reference to Banksy pieces which are taken down and sold for large sums. Nearby is a piece by Irony.

The piece by Dime can be found on New. Bird Street. An octopus holding a yellow submarine!

Greenland Street and the side streets from it are awash with street art. Many of the pieces were created as part of the Liverpool Mural Festival that was held in April 2018 and featured local and International artists.

Perhaps the most striking is the large work by StineHvid

On the walls next to Constellations café/bar are pieces by Aches and Burnon.

Newhall Street has a huge mural.

At the far end of Greenland Street is Crump Street. It is easily missed as there is nothing much around here and it leads only to the busy Parliament Street. It is however a treasure trove of street art from the Mural Festival.

Turning right from the end of Crump Street onto Parliament Street will bring you to the Stephen Hawking piece by Manchester artist Akse.

As with all street art it is a developing scene and by its very nature evolving. A return visit in twelve months or so will be something to look forward to.