Shoreditch street art

My parents came to visit this week and requested to see some of the street art in Shoreditch. Of course I obliged to such a surprising and uncharacteristic request by a couple of people in their 60s.

On Saturday we took the tube to Old Street and started from there. There’s this Japanese inspired lady on the corner where the Red Gallery is.

And this other lady which my mum is admiring in the below photo.

Then we headed down Rivington Street towards Cargo.

There was a man by stik, one of my favourite artists who is active in that area. I love those stik people, they’re so cute! Unfortunately we didn’t see many on our walk.

On the way towards Cargo we also saw a load of those picture frames with a slightly terrified looking individual. Unfortunately some of the pictures were already smashed in. Shame that people do such a thing!

I also really liked these colourful heads by Thierry Noir. There were quite a lot in the area. Wikipedia says that Thierry Noir is claimed to be the first street artist to have painted the Berlin Wall. Cool!

This is us posing with some street art.

We came across a few Banksy works of art which I was quite pleased with as I thought it’s nice to show my parents these famous pieces. But they didn’t really seem to know Banksy.

I quite liked this one next to the entrance of Cargo.

Then we retraced our steps back to Great Eastern Street because I figured we had to see the iconic “Adore and endure each other” painting.

On the way my dad discovered this one. The two people are drawn as if they’re made from strings – I recognise this artist but I wasn’t able to find the name.

We had a coffee at the Book Club on Leonard Street and saw this one nearby. Such a happy little fellow!

I wanted to take a photo of Darth and Luke by Invader and then this car appeared out of nowhere which is a piece of art in itself!

This is the mushroom on top of “Adore and endure each other” on Great Eastern Street. We spotted at least one more mushroom on our walk.

Spot the slice of water melon!

We saw a couple of pieces by ROA. I remember a few years ago there were a lot more. I guess they must have been painted over…

We went down to Brick Lane. First we had a salt beef bagel (I paused my veganism…) and then we continued spotting street art.

It was fun recognising pieces by artists that we had seen before. Or art in random locations like the side walk.

Here are my parents looking at street art while looking cool.

Yes:

Some more stuff we saw on Brick Lane.

I also enjoyed spotting small things, like that toilet. Funny!

Oh how different the world can look on a photo, as demonstrated by those two skulls.

We then went off to Hanbury Street as our last spot.

I studied programming on Hanbury Street for three months and had to constantly fight my way through all these tourists taking photos of this famous art work. The bird is by ROA, too.

My dad’s absolute favourite was the black gorilla.

This was really big! Very impressive.

Bonus material (not street art)

This is the restaurant of the co-working space called Second Home that my coding course was at.

The whole building is by some famous architect or other and it’s all organgy yellowish in colour. If you spend 12 hours a day for 3 months in this building as I did… it’s not fun or cool anymore, I can tell you. It drove us all crazy. Also, I remember reading a newspaper review of the restaurant (which is run by some famous chefs or other) and it said that when eating in the restaurant you feel like you’re inside a can of Fanta. So true and so funny!