Chopper

In a town of peeling paint, empty buildings and pre-pubescent drug pushers, a burst of well-crafted graffiti and thought out street art has managed to decorate our crumbling walls, bringing something a little more interesting to the aesthetic gunshot wound that Kettering Town often is. As derelict buildings litter our high-street and abandoned shops become billboards for fading rave event posters, a few intuitive lads took to the roof tops in the dead of night with spray-cans, stencils and wallpaper paste. The dreary boarded up windows and empty grey concrete walls around the town centre suddenly played host to huge Orwellian eyes, comic book gorillas and modified neighbourhood watch posters. Stencils of a Mohawked punk even cropped up at the police station.

Within the space of a few weeks, the town centre was noticeably brightened up, and it was nothing to do with the council’s dubious “Future of Kettering” placards. The street art was hardly ground breaking, and you won’t see the Eye See You Crew in the Louvre any time soon, but it did prove thought provoking and grabbed the attention of passers-by on a daily basis. Making a plain wall, or a corroding boarded up shop front interesting seemed to be appreciated by most that saw it.

The work of ‘Eye See You’

But despite this refreshing new addition to our public space, Kettering Borough Council saw it as a criminal offence that needed removing. In their eyes, the graffiti – that represents a young sub-culture that they seem so out of touch with – was marring the town’s scenery. They set about spraying off the eyes and the words and the Illuminati pyramids with high pressure water guns held by hired help inyellow suites.

It wouldn’t be such a pain in the neck to the artists involved had the town been in pristine condition in the first place. But when the council are painting over stencils with mismatching paint and tearing pieces down as soon as they’ve gone up, whilst leaving roughly sketched obscenities and dried streaks of blood on the walls (at the bus station in town), it begins to feel like more of a pointless vendetta against Kettering’s street artists than a case of keeping the place “tidy”.

Kettering Skatepark

We’re also lucky enough to have probably the only skatepark in the UK that has a strict no graffiti policy. Colourful time consuming murals were put up professionally on the backs of every quarter pipe and funbox in the summer of this year, animating the park in a way that those who use it would expect. After just 10 hours though, the KBC paint squad made their way to Iselodge with a huge bucket of black emulsion. They covered every inch of the graffiti murals and left the place an ironic blank canvas. They even recently broke their own record, by painting over a stencil that a girl had put up for a college art project in the space of time it took for her to walk back to college to get her camera. That’s about 20 minutes. If only they’d put as much effort into fixing the splitting timber, upturned nails and bockety ramps, the park might be a safer place.

The extensive measures taken by the council and an ominous threat from the police, seems to have unfortunately put the frighteners on the graffiti artists involved, as the new spree of street art has slowly come to a halt. For the moment at least…

Jake Hanrahan
Writes for MTV, The Independent, Sabotage Times, The Huffington Post and more. You can follow him on Twitter here: @oijake