Gallery:
Dragging Dragons Hyde Park
The Hyde Park area of Leeds.
Knife in Silhouette
Submitted by Andrew on Mon, 08/18/2008 - 18:15
A fruit knife stuck in a table, looking way cool in the night. Nothing else gets your point across quite like a dagger thrust into a table.
We had a little place for making tea in the Unity Base tent, where the comms people were. I was still hanging around after all the crowds had gone, too wired from the excitement of the day to even think about going home to bed. My pals had all gone to Wendy House but I couldn't face that either, so I hung out at Unity Base and carried on helping with odd chores. Odd, like lugging a heavy transformer box across a muddy field in the rainy night. Things like that.
I was chatting with one of the field stewards when we saw how the knife had been left in the table. I'm quite pleased at how the photo came out, though it took me a few goes at lining it up.
Cthulhu Rising
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 05/04/2008 - 19:36
There was a strange spate of CTHULHU graffiti around the Hyde Park area of Leeds in the mid-1990s. Chunky letters hinted that the stars were right and tentacles would soon be on their way. This was the last piece to survive.
I took this photo back in June 2004, when the paint was wearing thin. You can't really make it out at all anymore. When it was new the red paint gave the impression of boiling blood!
It was just off Hyde Park Road, around the back of where the Newlands pub used to be. The one that burned down in the 1995 riot.
All of the Cthulhu graffiti was done with letters in this style, usually with a thick outline. The biggest piece was along the wall of Royal Park School - the same one that's now an official graffiti wall. It just said CTHULHU in big reptile-green letters, six-foot high and forty-foot long!
Another well-known piece said CTHULHU RISING, this time in a sea-sickness inducing shade of blue. It was behind Prince's gym and you could see it on the way up Hyde Park Road. That piece disappeared when the building it was painted on was renovated.
Update: (16th December 2008) panoramio.com has a photo of the CTHULHU RISING piece. The building in the background was derelict for about a decade, and looks like just the place for some mad cultists (students live there now). The photo information at Panoramio dates it to 30th July 2008, but that's incorrect. The wall was replaced by garages when the house was renovated in 2005 or 2006.
At Some Point in this Conversation You Will Lie
Submitted by Andrew on Wed, 04/30/2008 - 16:37
I noticed this on my way to Oblong.
Stencilled a bench on Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, at the junction with Rampart Road.
Royal Park School - Graffiti Wall
Submitted by Andrew on Sat, 04/12/2008 - 12:36
An older view of the whole of the graffiti wall, taken from across the field towards Howden Place, on the 24th May 2004.
You don't see a view like this anymore. A multi-use gaming area, or "muga" was built, together with railings for the pathway, which now partially obstructs the view of the wall.