3 hours ago
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You know you’ve made an impact when the headlines upon your death are filled with words like “iconic”, “infamous”, “world class” and “upset Queen Elizabeth II”. By that measure, graffiti supremo Helch made a pretty serious mark on the world.
He died this week, leaving behind a country pockmarked by his tag, a giant towering HELCH, though sometimes reduced to just a simple upper-case H. It was on railway bridges and motorway overpasses, on derelict buildings and decrepit high rises. From Bristol to London, Helch was everywhere. He was even on a railway viaduct on the way to Windsor Castle, in 60ft high white letters, “ruining” the view of poor old Elizabeth’s home and apparently leaving our late monarch in an absolute rage.
He was only 34, which almost doesn’t make sense. It feels like his work has been around for ever, as much a part of the British urban landscape as red phone boxes and uncollected bins. In a post on Instagram, his gallery, BSMT Space, said “an urban landscape without an H in it seems unfathomable”. And it’s true, that towering letter defined the look of late 2010s Britain.
Unlike 2000s graffiti megastars such as Ben Eine or Sweet Toof, who operated in an east London that was still filled with squalor and dereliction, a place not yet lost to the endless tide of gentrification, Helch’s England was a more polished, sanitised, pristine place. Where his predecessors could run rampant on the wastelands that would soon be newbuilds, Helch had to work in a city where every inch of grit and urban sprawl had been levelled to make way for high-rise apartment blocks no one lives in and co-working spaces no one works in. Helch had to scrap for every inch of graffiti space, he had to hunt out the final concrete canvases left in the new steel and glass urbanity of England.
When you see Helch, you’re seeing the remains of what the country was before the developers came in and sold it all on. When you see Helch, you’re seeing someone lay claim to the city you’re in, or the road you’re on.
It was a comfort to spot a Helch tag as you made your way through London or down some miserable motorway. It meant that someone had persevered, that individuality had won through against the odds. He was just some miscreant from Hayes in London doing what all great graffiti artists do best: leaving his mark, shaping the city in his own image, and upsetting the poshos in the process. But he leaves behind a towering legacy, one that’ll cost the developers a hell of a lot to scrub off, and that makes it worth every penny.
