Banksy Tunnel by Tunde Valiszka
Leake Street london
A Long-Term Study of Urban Impermanence
This ongoing photographic series is a longitudinal exploration of London’s Leake Street, commonly known as the Banksy Tunnel, where graffiti operates not as decoration but as a living, contested language. Initiated in 2018, the project returns repeatedly to the same physical location, documenting its continuous cycles of creation, erasure, intervention and rebirth. Rather than treating the tunnel as a static site of street art, I approach it as a psychological and cultural organism. Each layer of paint becomes evidence of time, resistance, ego, anonymity and territorial dialogue. What emerges is not merely visual change, but a portrait of collective urban consciousness in flux.
The repetition of my presence in the same coordinates transforms the work into a meditation on impermanence, authorship and memory. What is preserved is not the artwork itself, which is destined to vanish, but the emotional and socio-political residue of a moment that existed only briefly before being overwritten. This series situates graffiti within the wider context of contemporary urban identity, where visibility is transient and expression exists in constant negotiation with power, regulation and public space. The tunnel becomes both archive and battlefield, a site where voice, defiance and vulnerability converge under the illusion of freedom. Here, the city speaks in layers. I simply listen.
Often referred to as the Sistine Chapel of the 21st century, the Banksy Tunnel is more than a landmark of contemporary graffiti culture. It is a volatile ecosystem where expression, resistance and visibility exist in a constant state of collision. Since 2018, I have been returning to this exact location as part of a long-term photographic study, observing its cyclical transformation through time. This series does not aim to glorify graffiti as spectacle, but to examine it as a social and psychological phenomenon. Each layer of paint, each overwritten message and each erased signature becomes part of a larger narrative about urban identity, temporality and authorship. What unfolds is a visual chronicle of impermanence, where creation and destruction coexist as an inseparable rhythm. The tunnel functions as a collective canvas and a silent witness to cultural flux. By repeatedly documenting the same walls, I explore how the city rewrites itself and how artistic expression resists permanence within spaces governed by surveillance, regulation and constant renewal. The work captures not just visual change, but the emotional residue left behind in its wake. This project positions the Banksy Tunnel not as a static monument of street art, but as a living archive of contemporary urban consciousness. A site where voices collide, disappear and resurface, leaving behind traces of presence, defiance and fleeting beauty.
Here, the city is not observed. It is felt.