Anarchists & Underdogs | Images of Social & Political Graffiti in the UK.

By Paul Wright

Long before the days of social media and online petitions graffiti has been used as an expressive display against the corporate and political powers that be.

When I say graffiti, I don’t mean the multi-coloured three dimensional ‘tagging’ and artwork that you see aside canal towpaths and scrapyards, I’m talking about early graffiti, hand written messages and slogans written by anarchists and underdogs across the county.

I picked up a couple of books on this subject ‘The writing on the wall’ by Roger Perry and ‘Graffiti’ by Richard Freeman. These books show a number of early images of graffiti dating from the 1960s through to the 1970s, a long time before the Bronx and subway inspired art reached our shores. Amongst a number of nonsensical written messages and slogans, there are pictures of graffiti which addresses racism, capitalism, greed and inequality, all daubed across the walls and bridges of our inner cities and suburbs.

These images got me intrigued and made me want to dig deeper and seek out more images of this nature. A high number of the images I came across were taken during the turbulent Thatcher years, where tensions were high and the disenfranchised expressed their anger and feelings towards the Tory government and authorities of the era.

There is something about the images below, a bold statement that makes you think deeper about the message being put across and what became of the people who wrote them.

Gallery

‘Ouch!! I’ve Been Hit By The Poll Tax’ Hackney, 1990. Photo © David Corio

Follow British Culture Archive:

Instagram twitter Facebook

Please HELP to SUPPORT our Crowdfunder campaign and help us maintain and preserve our resource and People’s Archive. Full details here Support British Culture Archive

2019 © British Culture Archive