Street art: Belfast City Council to create legal graffiti walls
By Finn Purdy
BBC News NI 3 nov 2023
Walk through parts of the city centre and its offshoots and you'll see explosions of colour on gable
walls, illuminating streets and alleys that were otherwise dark, drab and forgotten.
Now Belfast City Council has approved a plan to create legal "graffiti walls" to nurture those
behind the street art boom.
5 The idea is to provide spaces in the city where people are allowed to practise their craft without
having to worry about getting into trouble for it.
Hannah Constance, who has several pieces of street art in Belfast as well as in other cities across the
UK, supports the plan.
"I've come from a graffiti background, that's where I've learnt," she tells BBC News NI.
10 "I would have wanted legal walls back when I was 16, 15 years ago - then I wouldn't have gotten in
trouble."
Hannah has always wanted to paint on bigger canvases like walls but to do so can be prohibitively
expensive.
"As an artist you need to practice every day otherwise you're not going to get anywhere.
15 "If you look at some of the best street artists in the world, they're coming from cities in Europe that
all have legal walls that they can go and practise and paint."
She says young artists often approach her to ask where they can practice their art but she has never
had a good answer for them so she's delighted that could be about to change.
"It's going to bring a lot of positive change and it well help die down [illegal] tagging and graffiti
20 because you're giving people somewhere they can go and practice their styles without looking over
their shoulder."
SDLP councillor Gary McKeown, who put the proposal for legal graffiti walls to the council, says
Belfast has had an "explosion in fantastic street art" over the past few years.
The impulse to create that is something that he and the council want to push "towards a positive
25 outlet".
"The city council, to be fair, has actually been at the vanguard of promoting this and has worked
with creative artists across the city in developing really expectational pieces of street art," he says.
[…]
The councillor says that many of the details of the proposal, including where the walls will be, still
30 need to be worked out by officials.
But he hopes that paint will be splashed on the first legal graffiti wall early in the new year - the
selected locations will be "self-evident" and will probably already have a history of street art, he
says.
He also expects the move to lead to a reduction in what he calls "anti-social graffiti".
35 "We get regular constituency inquiries about tagging of public infrastructure and I know people get
really frustrated by that.
"As a consequence of this plan we will hopefully reduce some of the nuisance tagging that tends to
appear across the city.
"We would want to make sure if there are any issues around inappropriate stuff that's being put
40 around the walls that is managed... as it would be anyway with the council removing offensive
graffiti around the city."
Adam Turkington runs Seedhead Arts, a company offering street art tours and hosting events to
promote the art form.
He believes that street art in Belfast is "making the city a better place to exist".
45 "It highlights how art can, in a very tangible way, make people's lives better," he says.
Having worked in street art for more than 15 years, he's noticed the scene grow massively in recent
times.
"You would have seen it go from maybe two part-time street artists at best to probably north of 20
now and we're starting to see artists moving to Belfast from other parts of the world to live here
because the scene works.
"By and large, people realise that in terms of public art it's remarkably cheap in comparison to, say,
5 a sculpture and it can be utterly transformative.
"People sometimes ask me if I'm going to run out of walls and there's no way - there's so many
horrible walls, it's almost as if we don't think about that in our city planning."
Legal graffiti walls will help to open up street art to a wider range of people, he believes.
"We have a really, really strong female scene in Belfast and one of the reasons why street art can be
10 quite a male-dominated art form is that in order to get good at it you almost have to go down a dark
alleyway somewhere and practise it.
"It's basically allowing people who want to learn the skills a safe space to do so."
