The Hall of Fame
Sunderland's industrial sized graffiti history and its link to Leonardo DiCaprio and Gene Wilder
Sunderland’s bridges were built to be at least 25m above high tide to usher the world’s newly built ships out to sea. These improbably grand relics are the architecture of a region at the forefront of the industrial revolution. All I've known is their peaceful decay—railways, ports, and the cramped rows of workers' terraced housing. When the shipbuilding and coal mining disappeared, spoiled waste ground and infrastructure too costly to dismantle was left in its place. Sunderland in particular is known for these huge gulfs of abandonment. Today’s long promised regeneration comes in fits and starts, occasionally producing more damage than it repaired.
We remember Sunderland with nostalgia as the world’s biggest shipbuilding town, but when these places ran at full capacity, they arguably scarred us more than when they were cut away and cauterized. We’re left with the worst of both: Exploitative industry that was destructive as it lived and died. Both lead to equally irreversible decimation.
Hall of Fame
"Are you sure this is the right place?"
"Yep, see you!"
I hopped out of my mam’s car and instinctively followed the trail of graffiti away from the streets towards a long abandoned docks on the Sunderland coast. Graffiti writers seek many Eyes on their work, either by placing it in a high-traffic area (where it's quickly removed) or in a hidden, unloved space where it can last. In places like this, probing tags are occasionally left to flourish into complex masterpieces if its clear there are lax repercussions. Occasionally whole areas can become adopted by graffiti writers as almost-legal graffiti zones. A ‘Hall of Fame’ or ‘HOF’ is a term the graffiti community has carried over from its hip-hop beginnings in 1970s New York. It describes an area that is repeatedly painted with a consistently high standard of work.
These massive walls, once part of the railway infrastructure transferring coal to ships, now hosted graffiti pieces stacked on top of each other, running for hundreds of metres on both sides, a conveyor belt of constantly changing artwork. Anyone who has found their way off the path and into these places, especially as a child, will know the importance they hold. It does seem incredibly risky to head off into abandoned port infrastructure at 14 to commit crime, but for all the harm it could have done (or did), it at least instilled a sense of wonder about the secrets of the world. A sense of wonder that brings me back to the HOF, under the fence and up the abandoned railway tower to this day.
When I was younger I thought I was doing something illegal, rebellious and destructive by painting there. If I had known how positive this act was, I probably wouldn't have done it.
The way these walls self-curate is fascinating and non-obvious to those for whom the graffiti blends into a bubbling mass of colour. The most respected artists often get the best spots on the wall. Newer or less skilled artists might find their work relegated to the edges or less visible areas, as I did on my first trip there. I painted at the far reaches, where others would waste away dregs of paint from their better work in the central area.
Graffiti writers have a degree of detachment from their paintings, aware it could be removed or destroyed as soon as it's finished. Even huge and complex works in a HOF are prone to entropic destruction associated with the freedom abandonment offers. Even so, as a mark of respect the previous artist’s work must be covered in its entirety and attempts made to match or improve the effort of the work underneath, if you want to avoid ‘getting sparked clean out’.
Even where violence is occasionally used to maintain a loose hierarchic order, there is the draw of these anarchistic precepts for those pushed to the fringes in a search of meaning. Only now do I have the words to write about it, escaped from the gravity of these moments that made me who I am.
What, graffiti?
Most of my articles make reference to but never explore in depth this mental state you enter, once you pass into the metaphorical abandoned dock works. You might get a taste of this reading a good article, or on a countryside walk, but passing the threshold of legality as you produce graffiti reinforces your arrival in a different world. It’s not just the breaking of the law that puts graffiti writers in this zone. It’s the dedication to something from which you derive no discernible ‘profit’. In the execution of your art-crimes, you relegate the concerns of society. The illegality is just the 'Trespassers will be prosecuted' sign, which only seem to appear when there's something worth trespassing for.
Unlike those who smoke drugs in a sewer and skateboard by candlelight, our art leaves traces of its existence for the light of day. The walls propping up reality are marked with evidence of our departure from it. For me, graffiti was a bridge to another world that I gladly accepted, escaping the punishments of the one I had known as a child, having always lived with a nameless anguish. For those who feel misunderstood and mistreated by the world, the call of graffiti is undeniably strong.
For others graffiti is a dissenting voice, a siren song to those at risk of straying and therefore must be removed. It is a terrifying thought that while you give your days to serve an ideology of exploitation for reward, people seek to undermine that in free action at night. Graffiti is often painted over with messy swathes of block colour. This arguably uglier and less considerate alternative, indicates it is not simply about how it looks, the most oft-given reason, but what it means. If left to self manage, these communities create free outdoor art galleries, nobody deriving a profit, nobody consulted and nobody in charge. Terrifying.
Perhaps it’s another one of the themes of my writing that I take these huge leaps with the meaning of graffiti, but it’s hard to not describe these worlds as capitalist and anti-capitalist. So engrossed are many that they simply do not notice the graffiti until it’s on their property. Graffiti? What graffiti?
History
Eyes is a local graffiti legend, known for detailed 3 dimensional paintings that regularly transcend the letters they are based on, becoming futuristic hieroglyphs that amaze and bewilder graffiti artists and laypeople alike. His work is perfectly framed by the concrete and coal dystopia that he discovered in 1999.
The only people he met here were locals young people and a shop owner that walked his dog down there; they seemed to like the paintings. Slowly he added more, with the abandonment allowing him the time to paint intricately (and cheaply) with bucket paint and ladders. One day he was discovered by the police, who had come looking for stolen burnt out cars. They remarked "I see you've done a new one then".
With plenty of space and the visionary first steps taken, in 2002 other graffiti writers started to use the walls. By 2006, they had spiralled into constant use and yearly events were held; where writers would congregate from across the Europe to collaboratively paint over a summer weekend.
In 2012 redevelopment of the site by the port authority meant that this stretch of land was cut off between an active railway line and a port, then suitably fenced off. When I began to re-explore the site, I remarked to a friend how amazing it would be to get permission to reopen it as a legal wall.
"That would ruin it."
It’s interesting that a second phase of decay is preferable to it becoming a legal art space. Though still painted occasionally, the walls flake and crumble faster than they can be repaired and painted. Hardy plants that we know from other industrial waste grounds have returned, the soil having finally digested some of the poison.
We can never intentionally replicate the conditions that create robust and unique artists. The feats produced here are made even more incredible by these conditions, and the people who work here in the illegal gallery do it for the love of art. The risks they take are traceable in their style. I’m not saying you have to paint in these kinds of places to get ‘good’ at graffiti, but there is something available here that you can’t get anywhere else.
Existing in this world is not without consequence for its devotees. To become any way decent at graffiti writing you have to take risks to your physical and mental wellbeing. So much so that when someone declares themselves a graffiti writer, or our style and culture is borrowed and reproduced tastelessly, legally, it feels resoundingly shan for anyone that has devoted their lives to pursue this illegal art.
AMUK
Amuk, a graffiti writer from the south, created the UK’s biggest illegal graffiti piece to date at the HOF in 2008. Creating something so huge and intricate in this post-industrial setting brings to mind the ships that were once made here, and those who dedicated their lives to the craft. A century ago, would the obsessive artistry that equips someone to paint something so remarkable have given us a master welder or a draftsman? One of the unusual hallmarks of our modern individualistic society is that people are afforded the space to have these secret lives, graffiti personas, dedications to art that confer no capitalistic profit.
While the enmeshed communities that once worked and lived by the shipyards no longer exist, so allowing us these secret lives, the community of graffiti writers is relatively small. I knew that the same year Amuk’s giant piece was painted, they were handed one of the longest prison sentences for graffiti in the UK to this day. I reached out to Amuk, wanting to know more about the highs and lows of life as a graffiti writer.
"All the writers I met were decent. Faos was first, he linked me up with the only bed I slept in all the week. And a shower and a pretty funny night where I also met Aem... Next was Toupe (both of them on different occasions at first). I owe them a lot as on my last day I got real bad sun stroke and they brought me down loads of water."
Amuk’s stories about the painting speak of a very 2008 kind of logistics. It’s hard to imagine 16 years ago being so fundamentally different as to increase the challenge of a mammoth illegal painting, but I’m struck by how much harder it must have been. Graffiti and its techniques were not quite as widely shared, still passed person to person and not via Youtube video. You couldn’t just message a writer from the other side of the country on social media like I did to get in touch with Amuk.
None of us had seen anything like this painting before, nothing that scales up and replaces the light touch of the spray can with the rarely used heft of the paint roller so beautifully. To execute something on this scale so instinctively and still maintain the lettering styles that make graffiti so unique is nothing short of genius. Often you would walk into the HOF and see paintings that you could barely conceive were painted by hand. Finding these monumental pieces as a child, much like seeing Eyes’ work, felt like you were walking among pyramids in the Valley of the Kings. Painting alongside them could be frustrating, like trying to push a 2 tonne block of pyramid granite into place by yourself. I remember battling with the unwieldy spray paint and my finished piece looking malnourished and disjointed beside more experienced artists. There is something inspiring about being able to paint your futile first attempts on the same walls as the masters, that spurs you on in your passion to realise your own great paintings. For the most part, anyone who has passed the threshold of illegality is rewarded with some respect from the community.
Such significant pieces were painted with uncommonly pure intentions too, the lack of documentation makes me feel cynical and modern by comparison, when I ask Amuk why this piece isn’t as well known as it should be.
“All of these pieces have kinda been forgotten about now. I think it’s just the way graff and media content in general is treated. The consumption rate is rapid. Fresh pieces pop up daily and the timeline concept for how we view it means that history gets buried pretty quick.”
”That being said, most people who know about my piece are people who I would have had in mind while I was there. People I respect and admire. That matters more to me than 1000 people I don’t know at all, though It’s a nice feeling when I meet new people and they know about it.”
In the same year this was painted, around a decade into their journey as a graffiti writer, Amuk was handed an 18 month sentence for painting trains. This drive to create, to express oneself regardless of societal norms or legal consequences, is at the heart of what it means to live in the 'other world' of graffiti. The philosophy of prioritising artistic expression over conventional measures of success or security is easier to abide when it’s just sleepless nights skulking around with bags of paint. For Amuk though, even prison seems as though it was taken in stride, part of the highs and lows of achieving personal creative freedom.
“I’ve always been quite driven with graff. I’m a creative person and I really buzz of doing anything that lets me express myself. Not in like a splatty Jackson Pollock way. But in the sense that I’m doing what makes me happy and the ideas in my head get a chance to see daylight.“
“So doing that stuff never felt hard to initiate. The Hendon wall was physically tough, but planning it and the feeling of completing it felt good to me.“
“I definitely had some withdrawals after it. The feeling of purpose and achievement was hard to replace for a while.“
As the North grapples for its identity, places like the HOF in the shadow of post-industrial depravation are somehow easily missed. Does graffiti protect itself, with masters like Amuk remaining anonymous and unwilling to advocate for popular recognition? While this article feels like a betrayal of my secret culture, it is not to demonstrate how incredible these paintings are for your approval. It is to demonstrate how much is missing from the history books or online, how much is waiting for you on the other side of the fence.
Conc.
All of the work at the HOF has now either been painted over or repelled by the concrete itself. Momentary masterpieces are reduced to piles of flaking paint below the walls. The port continues to expand and redevelop nearby land as the decay continues. Industry comes from both the past and future to purge our unconventional use of space. The regeneration and promised return of industry, for those that have long lived in the shadow of its fall, is not something that we so eagerly pledge our future to. Especially the younger generation that cannot remember a time we thrived. When I pry the nostalgia apart from the reality of living in those conditions, it is always something which I want to consign to the past.
Our scarred land, the harbours, hills and desolation may seem like isolation without the industry that caused it. The North is in some ways marketed as a blank slate, with the echoes of industry touted as a usefully quaint deceased culture. In some cases it’s tourism that is tapping this potential, bringing us in for a loving hug while being quietly sick down the back of our jackets. Tourism wants only the type of culture that can be paraded and bundled up, not the true spirit of the North. Graffiti too becomes packaged up as ‘Street Art’ and flung about a city like gentrification spores, hoping to skip the first few steps and get straight to the rent increases.
In the grey areas where graffiti is left to thrive, we’re given a glimpse of culture left in the hands of those create it. It may start as tags, often shunned or dismissed as meaningless. Yet, as we reckon with our past, the art we create will inevitably challenge us, pushing boundaries and resisting easy digestion. We don’t need to enjoy, legalise, or package it for consumption—only nurture empathy for these early signs of a vibrant, expansive culture. With this understanding, we can foster art that genuinely resonates with the communities it springs from. By giving graffiti the time and space to evolve naturally, we can cultivate authentic expressions that speak to the soul of a place and its people.
Perhaps healing will come through art and industry alike, but the scars of the past must serve as guides in building the future we’ve long deserved.