Councillor seeks opinions on street art

A HIGH Green councillor who spends much of his free time removing graffiti from the area has teamed up with like-minded volunteers to have a large mural painted at a site where vandalism was rife.

Cllr David Ogle is now asking what the local community think of the new paint job. He said: “As many of you know, I remove graffiti tags as a volunteer in my community and have been doing this for years.

“We have a particularly prolific tagger, Mist1, living on my street who has covered High Green’s streets, Sheffield and much further a field with his pathetic tag.

“One of the many areas vandalised was the area surrounding the new Thorncliffe leisure centre. Painting over this middle-aged vandal’s tags would have just given him a blank canvas to re-vandalise, so we independent councillors at the parish council and city councillor John Booker organised street artists to do the work in the photo.

“For taggers to vandalise this type of art work is a big social no-no in the graffiti community, those who break these rules can find themselves excluded at best. So the street art should last and looks way better than what was on this wall before, I've send in pictures but know space is limited, its all on my Facebook page.

“The next stage is to create street art on two other badly tagged areas, with kids from Mr Terry Bawden’s volunteer youth club and Councillor Lakin and Brownriggs organisational skills, with city Cllr John Booker getting the necessary permissions and boring but complicated paperwork sorted.

“I know street arts not everyone’s cup of tea, but what’s been done looks way better than it was, it should last longer than a white wash and cost the same to do. Please give me feedback, thumbs up or down.”