“When I was in the cradle, sometimes I just wanted to get out of it because it’s really scary. But looking back now, I’m sad it’s over,” he said. “We just wanted to make the people of Leicester proud and I think we’ve done that so far.” Law was part of a team of artists who recently completed Europe’s tallest street art project, rising 82 meters (269 feet) up the side of St George’s Tower, known as the Blue Tower, in Leicester. It is almost twice the height of the UK’s previous tallest piece of street art, Athena Rising in Leeds, which was 46.8 meters (153 ft) high, and is now the fourth tallest piece of street art in the world, surpassed only by two artworks in Calgary, Canada and one in Karachi, Pakistan. “But it’s the only one of all these records that has been painted and designed by local artists,” said Izzy Hoskins, co-director of Leicester arts company Graffwerk, which produced the piece in partnership with BID Leicester. “We just felt that if we didn’t have local artists with the ability to paint it and we weren’t celebrating them, then what was the point?” Graffwerk specializes in large-scale street murals, and about three years ago its artists decided they wanted to break a record. “We looked at what was the tallest building in Leicester that had a painted surface, and that was St George’s Tower,” Hoskins said. The track is a tribute to the East Midlands city. It features a fox, in reference to the city’s football club, a tiger for the local rugby team, an astronaut representing the National Space Center and a double helix as the University of Leicester pioneered DNA fingerprinting. “It’s such a statement for Leicester and it’s such a statement for the UK,” said Hoskins, after the finishing touches on Saturday. “You can see it from so many miles away. in one part of the city you can see it four miles away.’ Lo worked alongside local artists Richard Peacock and Leigh Drummond, assisted by Ben Edwards and Kiene Tuckley, to bring the vision to life over five weeks. They took it in turns to paint from a swing about the size of a bench that hung from the side of the block. “You can’t stand back and look because you’d have to go all the way down and you’d just waste so much time,” he said. “So sometimes you just paint without knowing if it’s going to work or not. Some things we did the first attempt, others we had to go back and change them, there was a bit of back and forth.” Already people have traveled to the city to take pictures and the team behind it hope it will become a Leicester landmark. “We have this tremendous sense of pride when we stand back and see what has been accomplished,” Hoskins said. “We are a creative country, we have creative cities and we have some incredible artists. And it’s great to put it on this platform and show what’s possible.”
Towering achievements
Calgary Tower, Canada At 95 meters (312 feet) tall, a mural on the side of the Calgary Tower in Canada holds the title of tallest street art in the world. The abstract piece was created this year by German artist Mirko Reisser, known as DAIM, and took more than 500 cans of paint to complete. It was created as part of a project to transform a brutalist concrete area of the city into an outdoor urban art gallery. Statue of Unity, India Completed in 2018, the Statue of Unity in India now holds the title of tallest statue in the world, standing at 182 meters (597 ft). It depicts Indian politician and independence activist Vallabhbhai Patel and is twice the size of New York’s Statue of Liberty. Costing around 29.8 billion rupiah (£314 million), it has been under construction for four years and has lifts that can carry up to 15,000 tourists a day to a viewing gallery that is around 152 meters high. Arc Major, Belgium Unlike a historical monument, Bernar Venet’s Arc Majeur, a 200-ton steel sculpture around a highway in Belgium, is the tallest purely artistic sculpture in the world. Its location, on either side of the E411 between the cities of Namur and Luxembourg, was chosen so that the driver’s view is not obstructed by lampposts. It consists of two arches, 28 meters and 60 meters high, which emerge from the ground on either side of the road.
