Why this gallery

Today's media landscape brims with boring, derivative and commercial drivel. This gallery is a counterbalance to the misery of commercial culture in civic life.

It's also a sideswipe at mainstream cultural fixtures. Mass media entertainment is the commercialisation of culture. If you think Strictly Come Dancing is enjoyable, this website is not for you.

The public realm is awash with graffiti. The majority is disappointing and despoils our shared environment. Yet, a proportion of this graffiti is delightful. It's delightful to those who crave the unconventional side of human imagination. This work is gnarly. It's transgressive. It's lewd, offensive, funny - it is novel.

From canal towpaths to inner-city pubs, public toilets to motorway services, the canvas is boundless. You only need to look for it.

The beauty in brevity

This work poses questions, from the raw edge of human spontaneity. Who created it? Why? What did they mean? What was happening before they wrote it? What sequence of events came before? Of course these are all unanswerable questions. In a world of artifice and commercial culture, the inherent mystery is part of the fun. By its nature, this work is ephemeral — captured by happenstance. Once it appears, the clock is ticking before it's scrubbed. Once it's gone, it's gone.

Some work can be hard to decipher and is often open to interpretation. Some is crystal clear and written to take the piss out of people. Take this for example:

Googling Stephen French, you will learn he is a reformed 'gangster' from Toxteth, Liverpool. A man Danny Dyer interviewed in an episode of Danny Dyer Investigates in 2008.

18 years later, someone still found the motivation and desire to deride him in a Soho park, with a black marker pen.

Cultural salience

Most work is found in the UK, since that's where I live. The works themselves are predominantly culturally relevant to the UK. This can mean that the works themselves are nonsense to the outside eye, or have no deeper meaning (whether as a joke or a social observation). I suspect this gallery will have the most appeal to anyone who grew up in the UK.

Taking the above work Lime Street to Euston for example, I shan't explain why this it's funny. You either get it or you don't. (Presumbly the timetable gives French flexibility to operate around his existing gangster obligitions?)

My ambition is to capture the gritty, the originality, the transgressive and more importantly; the amusing. The Lavatorial hopes to capture for both posterity and pleasure the pithy, original and simply funny graffiti which is often found throughout the public realm.

Locations and posting

The gallery features latitude and longitude coordinates, so if you're very lucky and you find yourself close to the artwork, you might even be able to see it for yourself. The works are published as they are discovered in the wild.

A. Curator - 03/01/2026