ABSTRACT
Leake Street is London’s largest free graffiti area, where painting is permitted and un-curated. This chapter goes through the multi-layered history, ownership, and management of the Leake Street Tunnel to trace its graffiti-enabled growth and to critique the consumerist policies that led to its change. It provides the first comprehensive history and overview of the Tunnel and uses innovative visual methodology to document the vigour of graffiti writing and its formative impact in the Tunnel. The chapter pays particular attention to the thickness of Leake Street surfaces and the exemplary nature of this space as a materialisation of a surface commons.
In a time when places in London (and, indeed, other Western cities) rise to uniform prominence as cultural quarters through programmes of street art curation and muralisation, Leake Street is an example of how a problematic urban area can develop and regenerate with minimally intrusive interventions but with a lot of support for a culture to create and regulate an environment in its own terms.
