Hackney Road, E2. Photo © Roger Dean 2010
Another one. Hackney is determined to be philistine to the last. But I’m not sure how they have the right to demand the removal of this picture from the side of a privately owned building whose owners want the rabbit to be there. Apparently, not only is Hackney Council going to paint over this lovely 12-foot rabbit – which occupies the side of a recording studio and café in Hackney Road, and is by the international street artist ROA – they’re going to charge them for the privilege!
Hackney are a bunch of cretinous vandals.
Here is their official line: “Hackney council does not make a judgment call on whether graffiti is art or not, our task is to keep Hackney’s streets clean.”Like as if. Don’t even get me started on the subject of Hackney’s streets, or the graffiti they allow to remain.
Philistines. Last year they painted over Banksy’s mural in Church street actually while Banksy’s exhibition in Bristol was drawing massive queues of visitors (and revenues) every day! Local people were in tears, the owner of the house was distraught, and when they claimed they had “tried to contact her four times” – presumably to make the same asinine demands they’ve made of the Hackney Road recording studio – it turned out the land registry had her old address on file! So they’d written to the wrong address! Idiots.
Anyway, that’s enough about them. Look at this beautiful, beautiful rabbit. I’m no fan of vacuous tagging, as my eldest son knows, but I feel honoured to live in a time when artists roam the streets and create art out of the ruins of our cities. Here’s an older and also very nice photograph that was in the Guardian. Click picture to read article.
If they do take it down, the bastards, I’d be all for setting up a shrine in protest and leaving little Lindt bunnies in their gold foil wrapping at the site – if it could be supervised somehow – and if only it were the right time of year…
Too right. The Hare abides and belongs and will someday be a part of a passing child’s recollections of this age of ours.
(Maybe play the aircon down a little.)
A first draft:
ON A STREET MURAL
A twleve foot rabbit in profile,
looking askance through a swag
of ivy on a Hackney wall.
Rabbit or hare? Very much
street-genus anyway,
jackrabbit nostrils a-twitch
as if something of someone has gone
into a hare, a spell
to put a spring in his bones,
hare-brained on a hair-trigger
on the sidewalk, the long acre –
lepper, zig-zagger
ruffled and wound-tight
as Durer’s hare or Goya’s
burrow-eyed things of the night,
though hardly at home in a burrow
(unless its the Underground),
on a sound, on the word Go!
ready startle, to bolt
from the coppers, the council, the cleaners
who’d have walls molt.
Thanks for this Katy. He’s at home on your blog now anyway.
Dear Katy
What’s this obsession with hares and rabbits? You weren’t born in the year of the Rabbit, were you? My wife has a small white Easter bunny called Colin that she never goes anywhere without.
Best wishes from Simon
surely the business in the building need only super-impose their trading name over The Hare and that turns it into legal ID. Thousands of buildings have their name and logo painted on the facade.
Hackney Council no better than world-infamous Haringay. Barricades in the streets for godssakes.
Look to Paris!
Thanks Mark!
Hope you’re weathering things up there… x
How about removing the house from the rabbit, brick by brick, and letting it hop free. Lovely creature.
I like SAB’s solution to the problem