Graffiti Hunting

Graffiti – the word – typically conjures up images of either poorly done scrawl in spray paint, or a more likeable piece of street art like the ones done by the infamous Banksy. The stuff is prevalent in most urban areas and can be quite interesting, fun, and sometimes thought provoking to look at.

But graffiti is not a new art form, or new form of vandalism depending on your views. It dates back centuries! Many old castles (one of the best examples being the Tower of London) have carved out graffiti in towers, and sometimes even in churches you’ll find various carvings in pillars and walls.  Some pieces are just names, other are elaborately worked out statements or even art pieces, and others still are just finely done light etchings in the stone.

This week I was headed out to St. Albans to have a look at the cathedral. The amazingly old and yet well preserved wall paintings were the first thing to stand in awe of, and the other various pieces of the church were finely crafted and beautiful as well, but I spotted a leaflet on graffiti in the cathedral and just for kicks picked it up.

I took a long look at the ‘main features of the cathedral’, and then started looking for cleverly hidden graffiti from a number of time periods. My first find with the help of my new guide which gave you bricks to count and told you if it was going to be tricky to see, were skeletons. The skeletons were carved somewhat lightly right over the shoulder of  the statue of a medieval king. It took a few minutes to spot the little lines that composed the bones though. After that I set about finding as many of the pieces listed in my guide as I could. Everything from a beast, names, Latin, a hare, and a king were listed and hidden in plain sight on walls and pillars. Each one was somehow significant through its possibilities as a piece of heraldry, or a mark of an event, or a name of a benefactor. I looked high and low all over the oldest sections of the cathedral to see more snippets of its past. I was fairly successful in my quest,  the unfound pieces were in roped off areas, and there were some pieces that weren’t even in the guide I had found interesting, for example a hand with initials carved in it.

After the time I spent counting blocks, trying to catch a good angle for light, and walking around the same pillar four times – I realized just how neat this graffiti is. Some are older and medieval, other are newer and from the 1700’s, but they somehow  survived centuries in the abbey which has undergone major changes over time (including it turning into a cathedral). The scratches on the wall – whether a massive multi-block mural, or a tiny etching hiding a few inches above your head – are remnants of history, just with less decorum and little more mystery.

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Walk and information from “A short graffiti tour of St. Albans Abbey” in Occasional Paper (New Series) no. 3 published by The Fraternity of the Friends of Saint Albans Abbey

~ by amaranthye on June 20, 2012.