I love graffiti. Clever, artistic, thought provoking, pretty, colourful graffiti. Graffiti artists have a gift of which I am extremely jealous. It is a skill. A real skill.
Tagging, in contrast, is not a skill. It is anti-social and vandalism.
And sadly, tagging is now an epidemic in parts of Liverpool. It’s become prolific over the last few months. It looks horrible, and seems to be springing up everywhere, but especially near the Chinese quarter, and the ancient roads and buildings around Hope Street, a major performing arts area with the Everyman Theatre and the Philharmonic Hall a short distance from each other.
The tags are appearing on walls, doors, windows, signs, bloody everywhere there’s a bit of space. And places where there is no space.
The worst thing about tags is that nobody can ever understand them. That’s because of the lack of artistic skills. The original idea of a tag was that it identified a person or a gang or a no-go area. Tags were artistic and were also worn on clothing. Not any more.
The moron that’s going around tagging Liverpool is spoiling Liverpool. And once a few bits of vandalism appear it attracts copycats and others.
In some places they deliberately remove paint vandalism as quickly as they can in order to clean up before copycats, er, copy. But not Liverpool. The authorities here pretend they can’t afford to, and blame Margaret Thatcher, of course. So, the tags stay and encourage others. It’s getting bad now.
Wouldn’t it be a good idea if these vandals were caught, stopped and prosecuted before this exciting and vibrant part of town gets destroyed?
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