An evening at 10Foot, Tox and Fume’s gallery takeover

To step outside your house and not see a 10Foot tag is a rarity for anyone living in London. Once someone points it out to you, it follows you for the rest of time. In fact, if you live anywhere on the planet, you may some day see his scrawl, his dub (graff parlance for black and white bubbled letters) or his foot-shaped throw-up (a quick, signature piece). From Osaka to Orpington, Havana to Harlesden, his name is a constant patina on walls across the globe.

In London, the same could be said of his spray can-toting comrades, Tox and Fume. They’re also members of the notorious graffiti syndicate, DDS, which stands for Diabolical Dubstars, or occasionally, Doing Damage Son, in a nod to the vandalistic obsession that underpins the subculture.

Tox, to cut a long story short, was a terror in the 2000s. According to the 2023 Saatchi exhibition, Beyond the Streets, not only was his face used as the British Transport Police’s screensaver, but he’s also widely lauded as the most incarcerated king of the lines. His no-nonsense handstyle and dubs are pure London, ditching the frills seen in New York graffiti and prioritising damage and coverage over anything else. Like it or not, the geezer was (or is) productive.

Fume was long rumoured as West London’s folk villain. These days, though, he’s a father and devout Muslim. His heavy and gargantuan spray paintings were (and probably still are) a headache for any railway maintenance company. No matter how deep they clean, his work will likely never be effaced, clinging to some subterranean railway siding for time immemorial.

Old pals, the trio have joined forces on an exhibition held footsteps away from Piccadilly Circus station’s third exit. (Directions were shared via email mere hours before opening.) Entitled Long Dark Tunnel in ode to London’s underground system and Origin Unknown’s 1997 jungle classic, Valley of the Shadows, the show is set across Arts Arkade’s two floors, complete with an escalator and a set design redolent of the grubby train tracks the three have long stalked.

Outside the show, a queue of fare-dodging skate rats in box-fresh 110s, mega-vape honking longhairs and old faces coming down after a day’s work – one man is wearing his Biffa hi-vis – snake along Oxford Street. As part of 10Foot’s guest editorship for this week’s Big Issue, vendors flog the weekly, replete with a bizarro line-up of stories, spanning everything from features with 27-year-old gardener Laura Mythen, Banksy interviewing Tox and an advert for meme-bitch extraordinaire, 1inemillion.

After the show, over message, we ask 10Foot about his broad editorial choices, noting the sometimes very male, heterosexual tendencies of graff. He’s quick to concur, explaining that he edited based on what he likes. ​“Sometimes graff feels like a testosterone stew,” he explains. ​“I’m not really part of the graff scene; I’m just surrounded by whoever is being themselves.“

Inside, everyone from director Jonathan Glazer, Palace and Trapstar founders Lev Tanju and Mikey Trapstar, DJs Benji B and Skream, to musicians Mica Levi and Jimothy Lacoste and renegade designer Noki can be seen enjoying sangria (or ​“Track Grease” as it’s marketed). The walls are lined with 10Foot’s motorway signage paintings, each one providing yet more confusing directions. Turn left for this ​“This & That Init” signals one sign, while another flags an upcoming railway station with the directive, ​“Come We Do It Then.”

​“The paintings are Albion [an ancient literary term for Britain] observations, I suppose,” the enigmatic writer explains.

Elsewhere, Tox’s paintings, technicoloured abstracts, each numbered with the year of their making – a signature that defined his graff career – recall the visual typography of Tube maps. They’re worlds away from his illegal work, but still of the same school.

​“What’s in the show is what I did on the tracks and on the trains, and now I’ve put it in a gallery,” he tells us. ​“I’ve stuck to what I’ve been doing for years, now I’ve just stuck it on the wall in a building in central London. It’s kept to the true roots of my graffiti – even one of the canvases in the show is made from paint-stripper spray. That’s proper graff.”

Tox, for those unaware, has often been referenced by street artist Banksy, usually as a symbol of urban decay. Banksy, amongst graffers, is often deemed separate to their world, exemplary of the difference between gallery or street art and hardcore vandalism. Incidentally, when Tox was sentenced in the early 2010s for a score of paint-related offences across Old Blighty, prosecutor Hugo Lodge told the jury: ​“He is no Banksy. He doesn’t have the artistic skills, so he has to get his tag up as much as possible.”

Perhaps, that explains the provocative choice on 10Foot’s part to have Banksy converse with Tox in the Big Issue? Tox remains unphased by the sentence the judge gave him. What would he tell the judge now? ​“I called him a cunt when he gave me 27 months for changing the colour of a surface. I’d say the same now.” He continues: ​“If I could tell 24-year-old Tox he’d have an art exhibition in Piccadilly Circus, he’d tell me to fuck off, ​‘I’m off to Halfords to steal more spray paint’.”

Indeed, it’s certainly a milestone moment to see the likes of Fume, a writer that lived and breathed the subculture, in a gallery space, airing his labyrinthine paintings of tube tunnels, with ebullient, grinch-like figures haunting platforms and tiny, blink-and-miss-it tags that memorialise a life spent risking, well, life.

Of course, people have long been catching on that there’s more to graff than just dumb crime, but a real and palpable sense of organic, political resistance and grit that can sometimes be wanting in a city on its knees to gentrification and cringe-inducing street art tours. Certainly, this ethos is felt in the words of 10Foot, himself one of London’s most visibly (in paint and person) Pro-Palestine, anti-drudgery figures who swears by the words of the late Marxist ethnographer David Graeber. David wrote the Goldsmiths’ alum favourite, Bullshit Jobs (2018), a call to arms against pointless bureaucratic work for work’s sake, professing the power of a universal basic income – an ethos that defines figures like 10Foot and DDS.

It’s hard to put into words what graffiti means to its acolytes or why those that love it, love it. Fume, 10Foot and Tox are the definition of IYKYK legends, ​“They’re the wickedest,” says Palace designer, Gabriel Pluckrose. ​“Yeah, wicked. It’s the truth. I reckon it’s that.”

People no longer with us, such as the late, great Robbo – rumoured to have hit Banksy at an event following a well-documented rivalry – are also there in spirit. A shrine dedicated to Robbo, the Arsenal diehard, stood proud, candle-lit and stacked with dyes, Belton paint and gooner ephemera. His family stops by for a photo.

As scene faces nurse lagers and remember the good old days, a new generation of tunnel bunnies stock up on merch. We make our way home, clocking 3 individual 10Foot tags on the journey back. Long live the kings.