Art Travelling in London: back to Leake Street

It’s November 2020 and London is in its second lockdown. Nothing much to do and not many places to go. Winter is closing in and many people are going stir crazy.

I needed to shoot some footage of street art and graffiti so I went down to Waterloo Station on Lodon’s South Bank, to the Leake Street graffiti tunnel. I thought that, it being Friday, I might see some painters and there might be a bit of a buzz there.

The street were pretty busy with traffic as the bus cruised down from Shoreditch to Waterloo, but the sidewalks were empty. Activity picked up a bit as we approached Holborn but in the absence of anything beyond a few take-outs, there was no reason for anybody to be in town.

I walked along a near-deserted York Rd to the tunnel. It’s an overground tunnel; actually it’s the space under the railway arches (and it’s sometimes called Leake St Arches). I was a bit surprised to see that, apart from a few construction workers working on a building site accessed through the tunnel (another office and ‘luxury’ facility no doubt, yawn), it was almost deserted: there was only one artist in there.