As you might know, back in April I attended The Crystal Ship street art festival in the Belgian coastal city of Ostend.
Everybody seems to think that street art in Berlin is dead and undoubtedly the city isn’t anymore the ultimate destination for graffiti writers and all kinds of artists.
However, Berlin is home to two of the most popular graffiti crews worldwide (1UP and Berlin Kidz), a quirky Museum of Stickers and the art-gallery-turned-street-art-museum Urban Nation Berlin.
Urban Nation is responsible for the majority of urban art in the city, so our Berlin street art tour couldn’t start anywhere else than from their HQs on Bulowstrasse.
[UPDATE 2018: At last, I visited Urban Nation, read more below!]
When people asked me “Why Bristol?” my reply was always the same: “street art”.
The quiet hiss of the can as someone sprayed, and the shrill metal clacking as they shook it are the most distinctive sounds in Bristol, a city known more for the graffiti on its streets than for the paintings inside its museums.
Or, better, I should say as seen on the streets of the Northern Quarter, as almost all murals can be spotted in this neighbourhood. Once the centre of the cotton industry, nowadays Manchester’s Northern Quarter is the hipster heaven of the city, and the best place to find some great street art. The most spectacular large-scale murals in the area were painted during Cities of Hope, a street art festival highlighting social injustices while raising money for Manchester charities.
Even if Cardiff is better known for its love of rugby, during Euro2016 football championship the town was just as vibrant and euphoric.
Watching the mass outpouring of joy on Cardiff streets when the national team had defeated England made me decide that my first day trip from Bristol must have been to the capital city of Wales.