The Ruffled Crow

Today we’re doing the train up to Birmingham, and with Young Master Crow coming in to meet up with us last night, we delayed our big tour of the street art until today since he and I are both huge fans of the genre.

The Mild Mild West by Banksy

After a bit of breakfast at one of the ubiquitous Costas near the hotel we set off in search of Banksy. Mrs Crow and I had found a few of them yesterday in the M-Shed and near Spike Island so we dragged the young man down there to start our pilgrimage.Since Young Master Crow’s phone’s direction cone works far better than mine (it actually points the correct way) he led the way out and onwards to the next and subsequent pieces.

Now until Bristol, we hadn’t really had to contend with hills. That changd with a vengeance today. One of the pieces, The Rose Trap, is under plexi on a wall which is great. It is up a very steep hill, which is not so great. The fortunate bit is that just a little tad further up the hill is a life-saver of a tiny park where we sat under a tree to regain our breath and legs.

By that time we’d been wandering around Stokes Croft for a bit already and, unlike the rest of the city, street art was everywhere. I’m not exaggerating, either! Turn a corner, there’s a wall of it. Get a bit down a street and turn about for another persepective and find one you almost missed. Look up a building and there’s something you could’ve walked right by. It was a dream!

I’d studied my street art app last night and was able to recognize some of the art or artists and was like a cat with three mice in a bucket (pronounced boo-kay, but that’s another story for a few days from now).

Cheo, Chinagirl, Nick Walker, Cheba, Tom Miller, Sweet Toof, Banksy, and more. I should list them all, really, there were just so many! Mrs Crow is the photographer of us, but I still took over 60 pictures along the journey! There was so much that in some cases I just took a picture down the alley way to at least show the expanse of quality artwork along our way.

Untitled by Chinagirl Tile

When I’d planned our trip to the UK and decided on the stop in Bristol just for Banksy (and Bristol Blue Glass) I wasn’t sure what we’d find – if we’d just have looong walks between Banksy’s bits, or what, but this around six mile walk made this stop so worthwhile I just can’t express it properly.
Between the Mrs and I we have a sh*t-ton of pictures and I will very likely add many of them at the tail end of this post even after it’s published, so if you love street art as much as I do, check back over the next several days. We’re hitting the Welsh coast late next week and I should have the time to get caught up with the posts themselves and finish adding and captioning pics on this one.