It was a random walk down a few alleyways in Toronto in 2016 that began my obsession with street art. At that time, this website was already well-established… but this was the first time I had taken so many pictures of murals that I felt the need to give them their own article. You can read vol. 1 here. Fast-forward almost 10 years, and this has become perhaps my favorite series on this website.
Well, today is a special one. It’s time for a return to—NOT ONLY the city that started it all for this series on street art—but the EXACT PLACE in that city. Almost 10 years later, we’re back into Toronto for vol. 2, and we’re going to start in the same area where I originally fell in love with collecting murals: Kensington Market.
While it might seem like just some quirky hippie commune, Freetown Christiania is actually a self-proclaimed micro-nation within Denmark that operates by its own set of rules. It’s got its own flag (shown here), and the approximately 1,000 people who live within its borders apparently do not think of themselves as being Danish, but rather, as “Christianites.”
But let’s go back to the beginning of this improbable story. I think context is key here in order for this to make any sense.
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.
