De-Generations of London Graffiti

The Story of 10FOOT, TOX and FUME

Text by Carlo McCormick // Images provided by the artists and organized by Alekz

Right off the bat, the guy on the other end of the encrypted conversation tells me, “If I state something, it’s really just a question.” He goes by the name 10FOOT, not because he’s the most prolific writer in London but because he’s that tall, or seems that way, like it’s a childhood nickname, and judging from the response I’m getting from people in England when I tell them I will be talking to 10FOOT, he’s a legendary reprobate. So I guess he wants to make certain I know his uncertainty, that he and the rest of his mates are agnostics. That’s a good place to start.

10FOOT’s mates in this case are also notorious, similarly beloved and reviled for their vandalism, and with each there is the familiarity and ease of talking to an absolute stranger halfway across the world who isn’t working for the tabloids or the police. They go by the names of TOX and FUME, and they’re super nice, chill, a bit mental, but decent, straightforward and unpretentious blokes. You must wonder at the machinations of power, politics and corruption when these guys are considered the most reprehensible sort of public enemy while far more criminal sorts are running this world. They all share a deep common bond in graffiti, a cultural membership we might call a tribe, or call a sociologist, who would no doubt have a very sophisticated explanation for why such relatively well-adjusted folk participate in such anti-social behavior.

De-Generations of London Graffiti: A Story of 10FOOT, TOX and FUME — 10FOOT near Tower Bridge, London

Beyond their affinity for vandalism, along with their exceptional skill and tenacity at such a task, they’re all quite different. It would be great to tell you what characters they are, to describe their distinctly different personalities, but they’ve trusted us to keep their anonymity, and there are a bunch of people who want to put them in jail. They’ve all been to prison before, for the crime of their art, and it's hard not to blame them for not wanting to go back. One big difference between them, which we can and should tell you, is that they span three generations. FUME dominated in the nineties, as did TOX in the aughts, and 10FOOT did in the teens. These three are like historical markers of an underground, scratching up the backside of respectable society, as iconic as they are iconoclastic. They are widely remembered in a land where memory is constructed as an edifice of collective amnesia for their ability to deface the false nostalgic memories of a more civilized time.

No doubt there’s a crew of fresh faces doing serious damage at this very moment, who, if they go at it with the same fearless abandon and wily wits, may also join this disreputable pantheon, but they don’t yet have the wisdom of still being foolish when they know better. These cats are veterans, and inveterate delinquents, whose passions defy their age and obligations as husbands and fathers with the same radical grace as Peter Pan’s timeless, youth-defied gravity. And it’s their longevity, stubbornly tenacious and pathological, that inspired us here. The idea—which was not mine, so I can say it’s a good one—is that celebrating three decades of British graffiti writers is an apt way to remark on this being the thirtieth anniversary of Juxtapoz magazine. Having popped in and out of these pages for 30 years myself, like a weird old uncle who brings the same funky-smelling word salad to every holiday meal, I too appreciate how our time wasted can be our most remarkable investment. And if you are unfortunate enough to live so damn long, you too will know that at a certain point, style doesn’t matter, stamina does.

The great thing about graffiti is that it starts so very young in its practitioners, typically long before sex, drugs or the burdens of adulthood become distractions, so whenever one encounters these fabled enigmas, they are surprisingly not such wizened old geezers as one might expect. 10FOOT, the youngest among this lot of old hands, began writing when he was twelve. He cites a blend of corporate record label Hip-hop artwork and anarchist family members, and he really gets his creative mojo around 2007, when he meets TOX. “I got to see how graffiti functioned in the wild, how to do it on a level that made sense to my identity, more anti-social and crap than the American stuff, which seemed cool and stylish”. TOX, his mentor then, started in 1999 and began doing the trains properly by 2001, and remembers a grace period of comparable freedom before the London bombings of July 7, 2005, the 7/7 terrorist attack of coordinated suicide bombings that hit three different trains, and one bus, that killed over fifty people. “After that, the British Transport Police were given the money to do anything, and the power to check the bank records, phones and emails of anyone they wanted,” he explains. “It was a seven-year siege, up until the 2012 Olympics in London, when there was no terrorist attack, and they needed to start putting all that money elsewhere. That’s loosened things up a bit, but what hasn’t changed is that they’re still trying to blame everyone but themselves, and graffiti is an easy target.”

As TOX jokes, “I’m definitely a middle child here, FUME is our daddy,” they draw a timeline backwards, what 10FOOT called “a bastard child,” that is this living beast called graffiti and the lineage of their overlapping histories, all of them still active to some degree, but each of them noting their periods of rampant activity around their twenties. FUME starts this story then, starting to write in 1992 as an acolyte of those ’80s sensibilities captured in Style Wars and Subway Art, who only worked on trains, scornfully eschewing canvas or permissioned walls, describing the topography of public damage in halcyon terms. “Nineties London was beautiful, with lots of derelict buildings and far less cameras about. On Sundays, the streets would be empty and there would be squat parties that lasted two or three nights in a row, with the train yards wide open because they were next to these derelict buildings.” He still laughs at the cat and mouse of it all, how in that analog era, it was easy to “tune into police radios so you could get away in time,” a back door shut with advent of digital radios, just like so many other lines of access that were slammed closed in those same dark days TOX described. “Graffiti died down around 2007-2008 except for 10FOOT and a couple others,” he remembers, “We had to find our own way.”

If graffiti is everywhere now, pervasive in an increasingly permissive landscape, it is still a clandestine affair, functioning well in the shadows, taking aim when no one is looking and often cloaking itself in the garb of authority. It speaks to, and for, what is too often unsaid in the polite hush of public space, making visible the discomforts we choose not to examine, acts of self-assertion against the state, of resistance in all its futility, even when it whispers in the silence, like a madman muttering to himself, it is as loud as a primal scream. FUME tells us about this new kid BAS, who maybe even works with 10FOOT sometimes (don’t ask us, we’re not part of the surveillance state), who is the new king surpassing everyone on the trains there now. This is heartening and good to know, but it is not the knowledge of yore, the secrets of the old kings and their lost kingdoms. The young heads will always have the vitality to push us forward, but it’s the old ghosts who know how time rhymes and hold the poetry of the form, and when FUME speaks of the London Underground, it’s like the slow dance of memory: “Above ground is ugly to me, I don’t really do much work there, but underground, nothing has been changed, it’s like going back in time. You just have to keep going down, to find new spots, new tunnels and entrances that people have forgotten. Those old trains I used to paint had porous metals; you could still make out the old school tags like stains.” This art form, it seems, is not just about getting up, it is about going deep.

Juxtapoz turning thirty is a good excuse to reminisce about the past thirty years of graffiti as it has shaped and rewritten the story of London, but this mag has always been about tracking how these vernacular forms of youth culture—graffiti, street art, skateboards, comics, tattoos, posters, record covers and all the rest—migrate into the uneasy frame of fine art. 10FOOT, TOX and FUME are really no exception here. The main reason they were willing to trust some of their story with us is because they still have more to say (in a new way) that will hopefully keep them out of jail this time. To give credit due, we should say that we might never have been able to draw them out of their mythic obscurity if the London version of Beyond The Streets at the Saatchi Gallery in 2023 hadn’t happened. Beyond being a devilishly clever trick of power inversion, what TOX termed “going from to galleries,” it somehow got these writers thinking about what it means to be an artist. It’s not just a change of medium but of identity as well, and you can tell they haven’t fully made up their minds about it all, but they clearly are having fun making art and considering what they may have to say as artists.

In telling their histories, 10FOOT, TOX and FUME all emphasized how much they always looked down on the people who were selling out graffiti for a bit of cash, comfort or fame. They’re all more than a bit ambivalent about this gallery thing still, but like all of us who have learned to love art, they enjoy the challenge, the chance of discovery and the conversation of art itself that has been going on for many centuries now. It’s funny but each of them in their own way admitted that if they are masters of the subway, they started out feeling like toys trying to figure out how to express themselves on canvas, but they’re really getting somewhere. FUME has been hoovering up the ancient dust from the subway tunnels and using it as a wickedly obsessive medium by sprinkling it with spray glue on his canvases. TOX is making outlandish and mad paintings in the color palette of the eleven different subway lines of London. For 10FOOT, it’s a chance to explore bigger ideas than simply putting one’s tag on a canvas. He confesses that he’s more than up for the chance to fail, going full-on experimental in the convergence of art and music that has always inspired him, creating texts and sound pieces perhaps closer to the automatic writing of Robert Ashley or the expositions of chance in John Cage than the orthodoxies of graffiti.

Together, these three unlikely yet compatible artists and friends of different ages and life experiences are getting together to do a show of their own in their hometown. It’s a big step forward, maybe they stumble or maybe they will take flight, but for all the generations of writers and their fans around the UK, it’s going to be momentous. Perhaps for us at Juxtapoz, it’s as nice an anniversary gift as we could have hoped for. We can’t say for certain, at least until the statute of limitations runs out, but in 2020 Londoners woke up on the day after Christmas (also a national holiday there called Boxing Day) to find the busiest, most surveilled and protected of their tube stations, Oxford Circus, completely reimagined by the visual aggressions of some graffiti artists whose tags looked very much like those of these three artists. England, which reveres its holidays, as it used to honor its Sundays by staying at home, apparently shutters their entire mass transit system over Christmas. To pull off something so audacious was not just a supreme act of bravado, it was a brilliantly clever strategy.

Could it be that these same culprits might have the temerity to launch a show of their studio work right in the heart of Central London? Just maybe.

This article was originally published in our WINTER 2025 print quarterly

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