And we’re back in Europe with another batch of piping hot MURALS!
This is now the 4th street art feature I have done on London—which is already 4x more than any other city so far—and there are likely still more in the future. London is endless and it’s got an incredible street art scene. So much so that, in shooting this article, I actually crossed paths with a street art TOUR GROUP! That was a first for me… and I don’t think I liked it. 😂
This tour was only around Camden, which is a pretty touristy area, but still. If you want to see London’s street art uncut, check out my feature on South London. Nobody goes touristing down there, which is part of why I love it. It’s also home right now.
So, yeah. Camden. Let’s do this!
~*theme music plays*~Camden Town is a vibrant little area in north London that is famous for—among other things—its rich history with London’s musical lore. This area has long been associated with London’s punk scene, and indeed you’ll still see some people walking around this area sporting 2-foot high mohawks and all kinds of punk stylings that strike one as being almost performatively contrarian. Camden had deep ties to the early punk movement in Britain, with bands like The Clash, The Sex Pistols, and The Ramones famously frequenting this area. Apparently the photo on the cover of The Clash’s debut album (the real ones will know) was shot here in Camden. Later on, bands like Joy Division and The Cure would play here frequently, but Camden’s most recent contribution musical lore was none other than Amy Winehouse. She actually lived here, and as such, this neighborhood’s already-crowded mural scene is now infused with her likeness.
I could easily do a whole article solely on the musical history of Camden—and maybe I will in the future—so I won’t delve too deeply into that here. Instead, I just want to give you the context for some of the imagery you’ll see here.
I did this photo walk on a gray day in Spring 2024. As always, the walls of neighborhoods like this are in continuous evolution, so if you go to Camden today in search of murals, you probably won’t see all of these, but you will definitely see some new ones that have popped up since! Here’s the particular crop of murals that I saw…
As always, I’ve done my best to credit all of the talented artists behind the murals in the gallery above. Here’s everybody that I was able to track down, but if I’ve missed anybody, please reach out and let me know so I can update this article accordingly!
Curiouser
J💎YA1 (@joyaone)
Ben Eats Faces (@manyfaceses)
Damitta (@dmtart)
And here are a couple of other random pictures of the sections of Regent’s Canal that run through Camden.
And now, a few notes that I feel compelled to share on the face of this article: Amy Winehouse.
I have long been a distant appreciator of Amy Winehouse. I was fleetingly familiar with her music and I had a few songs I liked… but I don’t think that I really gave her a thorough listen until I was sifting through her deep cuts, looking for a song to use as the “Track of the Day”… ohmygawd she was good.
She released her debut album, “Frank”, when she was 19.
Like, WHAT? This is incredibly mature, complex, sophisticated songwriting. And she was f*cking 19????
This is a rare case when I think the term “genius” is warranted. In fact, “genius” might actually not go far enough, because it wasn’t just that she WROTE all of these songs—which, from an intellectual standpoint, would have been more than enough to prove that she was a musical savant—but her VOICE! For a 19-year-old—for ANYONE—it’s strong, it’s mature, and it’s got an identity and character all its own. As did Amy Winehouse, as a person. What a force of nature. It’s insane that all of this could have existed in the same human.
RIP Amy. We miss you. 💔
This article marks a ‘first’ for Peter’s Big Adventure: this was the FIRST time that I tried to upload so many photos at once that SquareSpace cut me off. Apparently the limit for a single-batch upload is 250. 😂
So that should be a good indicator for what is to come.
Today we’re venturing into East London to visit BRICK LANE. In Volume 1 of this series in South London, I spoke to how much walking I had endured in order to piece that article together. At the time, it seemed to me (a recent arrival here) that London’s street art was quite decentralized, but I have been proven wrong many times over since publishing that article. There are dense clusters of murals if you know where to look. And thankfully, I have gotten some good pointers from people who know London a lot better than I do about where to find these clusters.