Leake Street- Graffiti Tunnel Waterloo

Leake Street, in London, is a famous tunnel. Here artists can legally spray their works of art on the walls. What I find particularly nice is that there is no standard for good and bad. Everyone, like you and me, are welcome and everyone is free to go there and spray something on the wall.
You can find some crass pictures there and I often think to myself, how can you create so many small details with a spray can?

At 300m long, Leake Street is the longest graffiti wall in London. The tunnel lies under Waterloo Station between Lower Marsh and York Street.
For a long time the Eurostar terminal was in Waterloo station. At that time, the tunnel was used as an entrance for vehicles to the terminal. Since 2008, only pedestrians have been allowed to use the tunnel after ownership changed from Eurostar to the Rail Network.
The Cans Festival also took place in 2008 (Can= Dose). Organized by Banksy, he invited different artists from all over the world to exhibit their art in this tunnel. Originally you could find four works of art by Banksy here, but as is usual, works of art by other artists are sprayed over. Today there is no Banksy to be found in this tunnel.

Since Swantje also designs graffiti from time to time, I thought it might be a nice activity to go into the tunnel together and leave some of our own graffiti.
No sooner said than done, a motif was thought of, cans were bought and then we started looking for the perfect place.

And then she was there. Our little piece of wall on which we wanted to immortalize ourselves.

First Swantje sketched everything out in white and then we started coloring it. This is where I got involved.

The letters, the hats, the maid. An image with multiple meanings (I'll go into that again later).

Little by little, the individual components of our graffiti came together and slowly but surely the overall picture developed.

Small gaps were closed and three hours later the sketch that had come true stood before us.

Another hour later the final details were finished:

Our first graffiti together, graffiti that symbolizes us. Moods, Swantje's favorite combination of letters, London/Magdeburg on the left, the Magdeburg maid on the right, the pink hat (mine), the yellow hat (Swantje's) and then the snail, an insider between the two of us for years, who is still with us today still makes you laugh.

In total we sprayed for about four hours. Many tourists observed and photographed them during this time, but that's also part of it. And a day later I felt my muscles too. Especially my right forearm, which clearly wasn't used to using a spray can for so long.

Thank you Swantje for doing this campaign together. An experience I won't soon forget! I was able to learn a lot from you and got my first little insight into the graffiti world and what can I say, it was a lot of fun.

Now we have our own graffiti somewhere in the tunnel. Now hidden again under new layers of graffiti. Today, eleven days later, I went through the tunnel again and it was no longer visible. On the one hand it's a shame because you can't see it anymore, but on the other hand I think it's particularly beautiful. The tunnel is a constantly changing canvas. You can go through it every day and always find some new work of art that has been sprayed onto the wall.