Why famous faces are popping up mega-sized on UK streets

The UK’s heroes are no longer being honoured in marble on a plinth but with spray paint on a brick wall. Stephen Smith explores what’s behind this artistic revolution.

Between a jerk chicken restaurant and a nail bar, the familiar features of Spurs striker Harry Kane rise into the London sky. The England captain is the subject of a 25-feet high mural on Whitehall Street, opposite the great, gunmetal dreadnought of the Tottenham Hotspur stadium.

With his pensive 1,000-yard stare, the Kane of this portrait is North London’s answer to Che Guevara – or to put it another way, this is as close as a millionaire footballer is likely to come to the figurehead of the Cuban revolution, who is immortalised on the crumbling walls of old Havana.

Kane is one of a rapidly growing number of sports personalities and other celebrities seen at epic scale on murals in the backstreets of our cities and towns. Soccer fans once collected trading cards depicting their favourites; now they can gather and swap Instagram images which depict them as big as houses.

In recent weeks, Liverpool legends John Barnes and Roberto Firmino have been celebrated in spray paint, after musician Sir Elton John and champion jockey Frankie Dettori, whose supersized likeness will greet racegoers at the Epsom Derby next month.

The unsuspecting onlooker could be forgiven for thinking that Kane’s mural had gone up under the cover of darkness thanks to an army of dedicated fans, unacknowledged artists drawn from the estates around Tottenham’s ground.

In fact, it’s the creation of a former graphic designer pushing 50, David Nash, and a younger colleague. Surrounded by spent canisters of aerosol paint which litter the pavement, they’re putting the finishing touches to their work.

Nash, better known on the streets by his nom de can Gnasher, was a graffiti artist when still at school. “But it was all illegal back in the Eighties. Now you go into Tate Modern and you find graffiti is on the timeline of modern art,” he says.

Statues of famous men and women have fallen into decline in recent years – literally, in some cases – but Gnasher is one of a group of artists and taggers paying tribute to the heroes of today with gable ends and street corners as their canvas.

“When you look at a mural like the one of Mo Salah in Liverpool, the composition is not so different in intent to something by [portrait artists] Gainsborough or Reynolds,” says Prof Paul Gough, principal of Arts University Bournemouth. Gough is one of the country’s leading authorities on street art, so much so that some have even suggested he could be Banksy himself (“No comment!” is all he will tell me.)

Historically murals have been about the common man and woman re-owning the street, he says. “You see this with murals about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, without a doubt. They’re polemic and political at the same time. Football is the vernacular game. The fans who go and support their team in all weathers are reclaiming the street with these murals.”

In other words, the people’s game has met the art of the streets.

Gough echoes Gnasher’s point that urban art enjoys a prestige today, although there’s still no Banksy in a national gallery. “There can still be a sniffiness about a certain urban, grungy language.”

Even if museum status continues to elude Britain’s most famous street artist, his peers now have the confidence to switch up from spraying tags to creating images on a monumental scale. Outsize representations of sports stars and other revered figures have long been a common sight in Europe and Latin America but now the UK too.

The process of painting Kane’s likeness began with a coat of whitewash as a primer, says Gnasher.

“We drew numbers and squiggles all over the wall and passers-by thought that was going to be the mural. But we used those marks as points of reference, took a picture of them and overlaid our design on top so we knew where the facial features were. Then we started at the top of the wall and worked our way all the way down to the bottom. It’s like painting by numbers, with spray cans.”

It’s not only the beautiful game that’s being celebrated. Manchester United star Marcus Rashford and Liverpool’s Jordan Henderson have been recognised for their activism over school meals and NHS fundraising respectively.

“I used to say that graffiti art is a bit like a contact sport: an aggressive, assertive, often very masculine environment,” says Gough. “But it’s sobered a bit in the last five or so years and crossed genders so it’s not so masculine.” A number of women footballers have been depicted in murals – Lionesses Lucy Bronze and Jill Scott feature in a group portrait in Darlington.

The old masters of the Renaissance had popes and princes to thank for their careers; the pandemic appears to have been the unlikely midwife of the British sports mural.

During lockdown, a friend of Gnasher’s asked him if he would decorate his son’s bedroom with a football motif: the two men looked at each other and had a eureka moment – what if the grassroots art of the spray can got together with the passion of football?

A collective of street artists was assembled and they’ve been to many parts of the country to immortalise heroes in paint and brick.

“Sometimes the idea starts with fans, other times it comes from us,” says Marc Silver, the other man who shared that lightbulb moment, who has set up a company called MurWalls.

“For instance, a group of Liverpool fans who have a box at Anfield wanted to salute two club legends – Ian Callaghan and Phil Neal – so they got in touch. We’re on good terms with the city council, they found us a property where we could paint, and we did the mural.” A finished artwork costs upwards of about £5,000, says Silver.

Not all of his distinguished sitters are known for kicking a ball about. His stable of artists has produced murals of musicians including Sir Elton and the late Faithless musician Maxi Jazz. Silver is also sending a team to Los Angeles to paint the Teletubbies on a wall in Hollywood.

According to Gough, one reason for the interest in murals is their handmade, artisanal aspect.

“There’s something about the craft of painting, seeing these huge, almost medieval murals being put up, that stops people in their tracks. They’re more likely to talk about them and remember them and mention them to friends than they would if they were passing a billboard that’s been pasted up.”

Back on Whitehall Street, north London, Gnasher and his mate are standing back and squinting up at their handiwork. They’re checking that their daub of Harry Kane, envisaged to occupy an entire wall, is complete.

They think he’s all over. He is now.

Stephen Smith is a writer and broadcaster