NEWINGTON IN SPACE – 2025
MURAL DESCRIPTION:
This wall had its first mural in 1984. It was inspired by Beano and Dandy comics and showed all the different activities in the community centre. Then the graffiti jams of the late 80’s and 90’s organised by Hull kings Ziml, Pinky and others, brought together graffiti writers from East and West Hull, and all over the country. Some real legends have painted this wall before, such as Hull graff royals Leebo, Ekoe, V.Rok, SpamDog, Paris, Admass and many others. The Hull scene was buzzing – check out Heartlands or John Peel’s Sounds of the Suburbs – Humberside on Youtube.
The mural is jam-packed and very colourful, in a mixture of styles, by people of all ages. There is a space theme, with the planet earth curving up at the bottom and above it is outer space, complete with an alien on a skateboard, comets and flying saucers, a big one-eyed alien with tentacles, an astronaut, and a bright sun. There are slogans promoting equality and justice such as ‘I am a citizen of Earth’, ‘Many Hands’, ‘No-one is disposable’, ‘Revolution not Reform’, ‘All Mums Are Boss’, ‘Every flower blooms in its own time’, ‘Assume less, listen more’ and ‘Hull has always been Anti-Fascist – The Battle of Corporation Fields 1936’. These slogans are squirrelled away in the overall picture, on flags, asteroids, and abstract shapes. The wall has various political elements, such as a petrol station for aliens funnelling money into the pants of a capitalist pig, and a planet Earth in a blender, which refers to the current ecological crisis.
Upon the earth there are lots of local references, like Hull fair right at the centre, full of bright colours, fairground rides and hook-a-ducks, and beaming the word NEWINGTON in shafts of neon light into space. The area has a rich sporting history, and there are references to wrestling, cricket and of course rugby and football, including images of Boothferry park, MKM stadium, a tiger and an Airlie bird. There are animals from the mini-zoo in West park, and there are Lithuanian and Romanian logos, requested by groups that make use of the community centre. There are also lots of random images designed and/or painted by workshop participants, such as a meditating orang-utan, snails, birds, spray-cans emitting trees, flying acorns, and a shoal of little fish grouping together to fend off a big predator-fish.
There is also the ‘Newington Angel Fish’ which represents the Newington Neighborhood Plan.
This latest mural was part of the Live Like Legends project, celebrating 40 years of street culture in Hull. It was co-designed and painted with the Lonsdale community and people at events hosted by Cooperation Hull.
The artists are mike sprout, Skeg, Dhers, JimC, Pete Tommo, Victoria Hill, Ankor, Bast, H’ray, Arnold, Ella Dorton, Apy, Yes, Mum, George Harrison, Pat Thelwell, Arthur Harding, Gully Bujak, Roman Paluch-Machnik, Petra Codato, Hannah Crowther and loads of kids and adults who came to the workshops (most of their names are on the mural somewhere).
Thanks for the current mural, past murals and the LLL project, go to: Dave Coates, Liz Shepherd, Pinky, Ziml, Paris, Spam, Dan Watts, Sean Irving, Humber Street Gallery and Absolutely Cultured.
LIZ SHEPHERD:
The Lonsdale Community Centre was established in the 1980’s with the hope it would cater ‘from the cradle to the grave’. It was run mainly by volunteers in the early years with Liz Shepherd organising and over seeing the activities and events.
During it’s renovation years, 1980 to 1985, they had a working relation ship with the local senior school with some of the ‘remedial’ boys helping with digging out the hall floor, levelling 
off the floor on the balcony and building cupboards.
The centre was approached by Geoff Haslam, of Hull Architects Co-operative, with the suggestion of painting a mural on the back wall of the building. Geoff worked with the lads who were helping the centre out and they came up with designs based on cartoon characters. Then came the scaffolding covering the whole wall, Geoff & colleagues drawing the outlines and the boys painting the scenes. This was the first time anything like this had been seen in the area of Newington, another first for Lonsdale C.C.
This mural lasted quite a few years until Liz was approached by two teenagers, Pinky & Smell, who wanted to paint over the wall. They obtained permission from the Lonsdale C.C. committee and went ahead organising the paint and the artists. This was so different from anything that had been done at the centre and really opened up the communities appreciation for Graffiti Art.
PINKY:
Lonsdale was a big deal for the Hull graff scene. The two (or was it three) events that took place there in the early 90’s really upped the game as far as putting Hull on the Graff Map (not a real map, but I’d love to see one) .
What you need to remember is that graffiti was still in its infancy back then. The first real pieces only st
arted to appear in Hull in the mid to late 80s so everyone was a teenager or in there early twenties by the time Lonsdale happened. Why is that important? Well it wasn’t a culture where you could easily find examples of writers organising their own events. Yes a few had started to happen across the country, but the big ones like Bridlington had been organised by managers, councillors and people in suits. Even the early Hull events like the Humber Play Bus and the painting of Pink Elly Park had a guiding force of youth workers and council employees behind it. Lonsdale was different. We made it happen.
It may have been the fact that the side wall of Lonsdale already had a giant mural running across the gable end that alerted us to the spot. It was mash up of Beano and Dandy characters cavorting across a colourful landscape, those bootleg Desperate Dan and Dennis The Menace characters reflecting those found in fairgrounds, hand painted on the sides of the rides. Lonsdale just happens to be situated right at the top of Walton Street, and as anyone brought up in Hull or the surrounding environs will tell you if you ask em, “what’s special about Walton St?”… the answer is Hull Fair!
This annual Fair isn’t really like the ones you’ll have encountered in the local parks across the UK in the summer months. Hull Fair is unique, it’s massive, its totally engrained into the local community and its seriously big! The largest fun fair in the country in fact and its been happening every October for over 750 years.
Anyway before we wander off into the history of Hull lets bring it back to Lonsdale. Obviously as Hull kids we all went to fair, it was an obsession when I was growing up in the 80’s. We would go every night! So apart from the influence the fair must have had on the graff, and hand written signs, the freaky airbrushed characters, the colours and sounds, it may have also lead to us becoming awear of this giant wall which had not only been painted already but was looking like it needed a refresh. Oh and before we move on, Walton Street was already an important spot in the Hull graff map (im gonna have to make one of these maps). What we called the Walton St. hut was 
probably one of the first places in Hull to get painted. A flat roofed single story brick building close to the train lines and in the middle of a huge empty plot of land made it a prime painting spot from the mid 80s on. In fact the first pieces I ever saw in Hull where on there, I’m guessing around 1985, I must have seen them when we were snooping around the week before fair when we’d go see what had arrived or what was new, it was a big deal for us, fair was a shot of adrenalin in a pretty boring city as far as we were concerned. I never found out who did those pieces, they were pretty basic, painted straight onto the bare brick in Carplan no doubt, proper Beat Street early hip hop styles, but there was at least one character. They lit a fire under us. So the Walton Street Hut can lay claim to being the first regularly painted graff spot in Hull. Not a Hall of Fame (HOF) but a classic night-time trackside spot. Somewhere that was regularly painted throughout the 80s and 90s by most Hull writers and a few intrepid wanders from across the North like Sef Roc and the MTV crew in the 80s, with cans of that high-chrome silver that looked like a mirror on the wall, and later Sae and Royal in the 90s.
So there we have it, a little background on how, now the why. Well after a little research it seems it started with a photo opportunity in the Hull Daily Mail when Smell aka Ziml appeared in what was a classic local news paper reporting of graffiti back then, usually accompanied by the cheesy headline along the lines of ‘it’s a spray away day’. This was spotted by Liz Sheppard then head honcho at Lonsdale Community Centre and after a little Columbo work she made contact with him. She asked if he would know how to go about turning the now tired looking mural into something a bit more relevant to the times. As Ziml remembers it Liz said ‘we can sort out the funding all we need is the people to paint it’ music to the ears of a highly enthusiastic graffiti obsessed 14 year old!
This was early 1991 and the graff scene was pretty fractured. The first boom of teenage hip hop influenced graffiti activity was over and had morphed into a more expressive, psychedelic influenced abstraction, a deconstruction or letters and characters. Freedom from the rules we’d taken so seriously at the beginning began to show, especially within the ranks of DRA crew and the other West Hull crews like RAR. So by the early 90s things had become looser, reflecting the influence of the music we were listening to at the time like the positive hip hop of the Native Tongues, the loose indie guitar sound of Manchester, Rave and its lysergic sister sound Ambient House and the rediscovery of those classic albums from the late 60s and early 70’s – everything from Forever Changes, Dark Side of the Moon, The Beatles and Stevie Wonder.
So after a couple of phone calls to me and the other DRA crew members we had a meeting at the centre, it was a gathering of the crews both East and West.
After a few meetings a date was set for the Jam. We needed a name so that we could write to the paint companies asking for paint, ‘hey we’re a community group in Hull and we’re painting a mural’. By paint companies I mean the car paint manufactures, there was no art paint in that era, that was a decade away at least. The Jam was called Aerosolution (I think I came up with that one!) The date was Sunday April 12th, the main wall would be painted to ladder height and the writers we invited from out of town would paint boards. From what I remember, writers who painted the first jam included Equal, Elite, Detour, Smell, Pinky, Decode, Dlite and Si2 on the wall 
and on boards amongst others were Morn, Gasface and Mobster.
Lets just say it was big! In this era the culture was very interconnected through the interchange of letters and photos as well as zines, word got out and guess what, hundreds of teenage writers turned up from across the North. I’ve met people decades later that tell me they were there.
The weather held out which, considering we decided to hold it in April in Hull, is a miracle. A rig was set up, possibly hired from High Power Sound System and the local crews brought out their DJs, I’m guessing ENF from East Hull and Fast T from West both played. If I remember rightly the writers where never that bothered about all that, more focused on painting and making sure no one walked off with the odd stray can. It was a pretty mad scene. The pieces were a mix of early 90s styles with those bottom heavy letters and the new style of semi abstracted pieces, the influence of seeing writers like Jon One and Meo at Bridlington in ’89, the glimpses of another way hidden in the pages of Spraycan Art and the recent developments in the UK underground within the area of dance culture and the visuals it inspired in the central cortex. Also this was a Sunday and I’m pretty sure most of us had been out the night before either to The Welly or Spiders, the party continuing into Sunday, the pieces reflecting the energy of that moment.
So the first event was a success and what do we do now, obviously we double down and decide we’re gonna paint the whole wall top to 
bottom. Now this was gonna require a lot more money and organisation so its decided we’ll create a collective, a kinda community company I guess is what you’d call it now. Really it was a way to write to paint companies and seeming legit. We came up with 0482 Collective, not the coolest but to be honest it was supposed to sound harmless, you know that in the early 90’s you couldn’t go around telling people you were a bunch of mad kids painting graff. Sheik the maverick graphic designer, DJ, producer and all round dude came up with the logo and we had headed note paper printed. It was official, we could write to all these car paint companies asking for donations or at least discounted paint. Leading to several road tips to paint factories in Lancashire and the Midlands from what I remember. We had a lot of paint, we also had a massive wall. Next up was scaffold. Of course everyone had to take a health and safety course and be wearing the appropriate safety gear right? Well lets just say it was 1991 and of course you can have a load of hyped up writers hanging off a twenty foot scaffold no problem! The Jam was huge, two days of paint fumes, music, films showings inside the centre, MC’s and writers from all over the country tagging up and swaggering about checking out each others flicks and outlines.
Lonsdale was now sanctioned as a painting spot. I guess we needed to ask if we could paint there but the answer was always yes. The 90s saw a series of big pieces and productions by me and Ziml 
including the Animals Vs The City piece we did around 95. An epic piece done over several daze. I was in full flow state at this point, painting letters but mashing them up. An anti-wildstyle mash up of characters and letters all done in the moment. Smel was on fire, his piece was a master class in the technological aspects of wildstyle lettering, turning the whole piece into a flying rocket that hovers over a dystopian city. He told me it’s about his leaving Hull to go to Uni in Nottingham. I probably did know that at the time but I remember it having more to do with the balance of nature verses machine. Anyway it was a burner. The last time I painted there wasn’t long before I left Hull in 1998. It was an epic end-to-end production with me, Ziml, Eko, Perv and Admas. It was a high watermark in the Hull style we had developed during this era. The Eko characters pulling the whole thing together.
I’m not really sure what happened during the 00s, it seems like the scene moved on from Lonsdale. New spots where discovered and now, with all the Bankside walls, it seems less well known. That is until now. Lead by mike sprout the whole wall has finally been repainted. End-to-end top-to-bottom. Long live Lonsdale!
Pinky DRA June 2025
Hull Street Art is a free resource for people looking to discover new pieces, to find out more about the artists behind them and to immerse themselves in the Hull street art scene like never before.
https://agencyrush.com/artist/pinkyvision/
So theres a load of history. This year we wanted to repaint the wall, so we did some community design workshops where a load of people generated ideas and sketches. I took these away and finalised a design, then we started priming the wall. Its a big wall, it took a lot of doing!
Then, in another bunch of public workshops, we painted the mural! Cooperation-Hull helped, and ran events in centre while we painted. It was one of the funnest murals ive done – so many people dropping in and out, so many artists doing different styles, so old-school legends as well as young peoiple and kids who had never painted a wall before – and i think we pulled everyones work together really well, into a cohesive mural. People were constantly walking by and shouting out how much they liked it, and their memories of the old murals, especially the big eye in the middle, which we included again.
so much fun, Long Live Lonsdale!!
– mike sprout
What was going on behind the wall was just as interesting as what went ON the wall…
Cooperation Hull are all about the magic of face to face gatherings. Their open day was a chance for the neighbourhood to get together, share food and laughter, and have some really important conversations about the state of the world, what’s going on in our communities and our country, and most importantly – what we can do about it if we work together.
The open day launched a series of people’s assemblies at the Lonsdale, introducing simple tools like savings clubs (aka didlums) and food co-ops, where we take our money away from loan sharks, banks and supermarkets and have more power for us in our communities. Both the mural and the open day were a celebration of cooperation, collaboration – and of course a splatter of chaos.
-Cooperation Hull
The mural workshops were part of the city wide celebration of street culture, that was Live Like Legends. LLL grew out of a bunch of old and young graff writers collaborating on walls and exhibitions together, fantasising about a book of Hull’s graff history, and last year, a big retrospective exhibition at Humber Street Gallery. We got some Arts Council money to put workshops on, and the Lonsdale mural was our grand finale… for now!
