This editorial on street art absorbed into the machinery of urban branding was originally published in my street art newsletter, Beyond the Walls, which lands in inboxes on the 1st of every month with reflections and unexpected finds. This excerpt is from the August 1st, 2025, edition. Subscribe here to receive future issues.
Polished, Branded, and Safe: The Fate of Street Art in London
For those of us who came of age in the 1990s, London felt like the future. It was fast, edgy, unpredictable. Ideas landed there before they reached the rest of Europe. Music, fashion, culture, it all seemed to converge and mutate on London’s streets, offering a glimpse of what the world might look like next.
And maybe it still does. But if London continues to point toward the future, it also sends a warning, especially when it comes to urban creativity. Because the future that’s already unfolding on London’s streets doesn’t look great.
When I spent a summer there last year, researching for my upcoming book on London street art, I often stumbled upon polish, urban decoration instead of experimentation and spontaneity. Once the cradle of Europe’s countercultures, London has become a city where creativity is managed, branded, and sold.
The Beautiful Lie of the Creative City
Over the past two decades, London has been reshaped by a particular idea of urban development. Public squares have turned into shopping centers, old warehouses into luxury flats, streets into corridors of surveillance and controlled access. What looks like public space often isn’t. Much of it is what urban planners call POPS: privately owned public spaces, where behaviour is regulated and spontaneity is discouraged, all under heavy CCTV surveillance.
Within this controlled environment, street art has undergone a transformation. The raw, uninvited, and ephemeral gestures that once animated London’s walls have largely disappeared. In their place, we find large-scale, commissioned murals: clean, polished, and perfectly aligned with their surroundings. These works are big, bold, and beautifully executed, but they don’t challenge anything. They blend in. They behave.
In many cases, these murals function more like set dressing than public art: stylised visuals designed to give character to a new development, or colour to a corporate plaza. They’re dropped in like design elements, meant to add just enough “edge” to a place without actually making it uncomfortable.
Artwashing VS Authenticity
What I saw in London is street art repurposed as a branding tool, used to sell a lifestyle, a neighbourhood, or a corporate image. Murals have become a way to make redevelopment look cool and edgy. Developers and marketing teams love to talk about “creativity,” but what they really want is a version of it that’s easy to digest, Instagrammable, predictable, and safe.
Street art becomes a layer of paint over gentrification: a mural goes up, and the real changes happening behind it (displacement, exclusion, surveillance) are pushed out of sight.
And yet, as highlighted by Rafael Schacter in his latest book “Monumental Graffiti,” the language used around these artworks still borrows from the old narratives. We’re told they’re “authentic,” “rebellious,” even “disruptive.” But in reality, they often do the opposite: they smooth things over, decorate the surface, and leave no room for critique.
What we’re left with is a strange contradiction: art that looks rebellious but is actually reinforcing the status quo. Murals that claim to represent the street, but are designed to make it more profitable. A façade of creativity, sold as evidence that a place is still “authentic,” even when it’s been completely remade.
London didn’t invent this model, but it’s become a textbook example of how easily street art can be absorbed into the machinery of urban branding. A city that once felt unruly and unpredictable has learned to manage its creativity, to clean it up, scale it up, and make it work for property developers. A creativity that sells, not one that shakes things up.
If London still points to what’s next, it’s up to us to decide whether we follow that direction, or find another way.
P.S. Not everything is corrupted or lost. In my upcoming book on London street art, you’ll find many examples of what truly good artworks are, and what they do. Authentic street art, for real this time.
P.P.S An editorial from the past that still feels like a good reason to stay optimistic.
