The Story Walls

This programme contains some strong language.

This is a challenging project on so many different levels.

Three Belfast artists are heading to southeast London,

where racial tension runs high, and relationships with police have

been strained since the Stephen Lawrence murder 20 years ago.

The police would like you to believe that they're working really

hard with the community, but I still think they have a long way to go.

The artists' mission to bring our mural tradition to London.

With six teenagers, they hope to create three murals that express the

mood of young people in

predominantly black southeast London today.

Ultimately, it will be wonderful, if the young people decided to

paint an Ulster style-mural on a wall here in New Cross.

But can three guys from Northern Ireland,

armed only with brushes and paint pots, really make a difference?

This thing will create debate.

Since the Good Friday Agreement,

three mural artists from Belfast have turned their talents to

creating murals that unite, rather than divide.

I am Danny Devenny, and I've been painting murals

for as long as I can remember.

My background in painting murals

originates from my time in prison,

round about 1973, '74.

Since his release, Danny has painted over 1,000 murals

and has become the visual voice of Sinn Fein.

There's an even longer tradition of

mural artists from the Loyalist community.

My name is Mark Ervine, I come from East Belfast,

I've been painting murals for nigh on 33 years.

We weren't taught our own history in schools,

we learned about Romans and Vikings and 1066 and all that,

and I see the murals, street art, as an ideal vehicle to create debate.

Mark is the son of the late David Ervine, the former leader

of the Progressive Unionist Party, the political wing of the UVF.

My name is Marty Lyons, I'm from the Falls Road

and I started painting in 1981.

I started to paint murals instead of graffiti,

to show support for the prisoners that were on the blanket protests.

Despite their different backgrounds, all three now often work together.

This is a new mural that was started a week ago.

It's in - I don't know what they call this - Kelly Square? What do you call this, Mark?

-Bank Square.

-Bank Square.

To be quite honest, I think we became friends, first and foremost.

If you had said to me,

10, 15, 20 years ago that I would end up working with a former IRA man,

a Republican ex-prisoner,

I'd have asked the men in white coats to come out and pick you up, I would never have believed it.

I'm able to do that,

with the backing of...

99.9% of my community

and Danny's community.

Now, Danny, Mark and Marty are about to face their biggest challenge yet.

They've been invited to Goldsmiths University in London,

one of the best art colleges in the world, where British artist

Damien Hirst was a former student.

-It's not my cup of tea. It looks like it belongs in a hospital, or something.

-I like it.

The project is being driven by John Johnston, an expert

on murals and how they can be used as a force for good.

The working-class areas of Belfast are marked by these murals,

and that's no accident.

Working alongside six teenagers, Danny, Mark

and Marty have just four days to research, design and produce three

travelling murals that will go on

tour to schools and community centres.

They're hoping it will inspire a generation of Londoners to

take up the tradition.

But can a bunch of guys from Belfast be taken

seriously in a part of the world they know very little about?

We talked about the possibility of them coming to London to

develop a project here in New Cross about a very sensitive issue.

An issue which some people would say is a black issue,

and they've got white skin,

but they bring with them a wealth of experience,

and they bring with them a particular skill set,

that wouldn't be as readily available

to me in the local artistic community.

Danny, Mark and Marty have been advised by Doreen Lawrence,

mother of Stephen Lawrence.

Stephen was killed by racists as

he waited for a bus in April 1993.

I have one more son,

and how safe is he going to be until these killers have been caught?

20 years on, with Stephen's killers finally behind bars,

Doreen still believes there is a divide between the community

and the Metropolitan Police.

There's still such a deep-rooted racism,

people are still suffering from racism from the police,

people are still being stopped, and that hasn't changed much,

I think it has increased.

In yous come.

As you can see, we've got the paint, we've got the brushes,

we've got everything set up for you,

and you've got six big lumps of wood.

By the end of the week, you've got to have a painting on that.

It won't take us long to fill them, John.

JOHN LAUGHS

Working alongside six local schoolchildren, they've got

to paint murals that they hope will inform, inspire and provoke debate.

This project is challenging on so many different levels,

because we're dealing with an issue which is extremely sensitive.

I'm Mark, I'm from Belfast, I'm very glad to be here.

Bringing three artists from Belfast is another challenge,

because it could be said,

and rightly so, "Why are you bringing outsiders from Belfast,

"from Northern Ireland, to this place, to paint a picture about this place?"

Did you ever see Back To The Future? Any of yous watch that film?

Remember the guy in the car?

LAUGHTER

So if any of yous want an autograph.

I'm Danny D, a muralist from Belfast.

The five girls and one boy who will be working with the artists

all come from the same school in southeast London.

If you lived in certain places, there will be groups of people

who would attack people in a minority.

Historian and activist Devon Thomas has been invited to

talk about the issues affecting people in this part of London.

What institutional racism deals with is the fact that you've got

structures in place that work in particular kinds of ways,

so you've got to change the structures and the ways they work.

When I asked the question if a painting could be done in this

community, which in some way, asked the critical questions

about the past, about its history,

what would it be about?

The answer which came back to me was the New Cross fire.

In 1981, a fire at a birthday party at 439 New Cross Road, at

Deptford in southeast London, ended the lives of 13 black teenagers.

A 14th victim killed himself two years later.

The New Cross fire disaster was in my head vaguely,

the reason that I was aware of it was

because it came about just in between the two hunger strikes here.

REPORTER: 'This is all that remains of the three-storey house where

'nearly 100 young West Indians were celebrating at an all-night

'birthday party for two young friends.'

So, people within my community, would have been

constantly watching every news item,

and that's obviously one of the issues that came up during all the

stuff that we were maybe more focused on -

what was taking place in the prisons here.

To this day, there is still debate over whether the fire was

a racist attack, or whether it was started accidentally.

What is clear is that the initial police investigation

failed to bring anyone to account.

Though the fire itself was not a racist attack,

everything else that went along with the fire was racist.

And what the New Cross fire signified was, this was it,

our back was against the wall.

I always say, before New Cross, we were coloured immigrants.

After that, we became black Britons.

The Stephen Lawrence story and the legacy of the New Cross fire

have given the artists and schoolchildren ideas for the murals.

I was hoping to have, maybe, a man sitting in his garden at home,

watering his plants.

The 14 little flowers represent each of the children.

He's watering the new flower, which is the future.

His roots, as well as the roots of the flowers,

are totally embedded in the soil in which is,

and I think maybe we can play about with things like that.

Police stop-and-search powers are a big issue for the teenagers.

If they're out and that, all, like, most of the boys,

they just get stopped all the time, like my brother,

one day he got stopped five times.

One of the other images that

I felt is unavoidable was a bobby

with his mouth wide open,

and inside the mouth, bars, like cage bars,

with hands on the cage,

but in the place of the face, a mirror, so that whoever was looking

at this thing, could see themselves.

This is only the beginning of it.

So the artists from Belfast who are here working with the young people,

they will finish on Saturday and they'll be getting on the train

and going back to the airport and flying back to Belfast.

The artwork stays here,

and it's going to be used as an educational tool.

And in effect,

those young people are going to become teachers.

I think it's really good that they are actually listening to us,

and taking it, and making it a big picture, this is really good.

Mark and Danny want to know more about 14-year-old Tayla Jones's

experiences with the police.

They're not doing nothing, they're just riding their bikes

and playing football...

So why are they getting stopped?

Yeah, I personally... I think... it's right and wrong...

because stop and search is to prevent...

Yes, but if they have reason to stop and search you...

Like, some police officers,

they don't have a reason to stop and search you.

What's best about murals is people pass them by quite quickly,

and if you look at it for one second, you understand what it says.

And the best is a slogan.

So, there's a challenge for yous, that's your homework.

Do yous get homework now, still? No?!

Don't put yourself under pressure, but if something pops

-into your head, throw it on the table tomorrow and we'll see what happens.

-Yes.

-Put your ruler here.

Once they have agreed on the images they intend to use,

they mark them up using a grid system,

which will then be blown up and replicated on the wall.

Danny needs a willing volunteer.

I actually need a male, so I think this young lad is going to volunteer himself!

Everybody who says Miles should do it, put your hands up.

Miles poses for a photograph, recreating a typical police stop-and-search position.

I had to pretend there was a wall in front of me, and, like, a mime,

and lean forward.

Hunch your shoulders forward a wee bit, I think.

What do you think that looks like? What do you think...?

Yes, looks like he's being stopped and searched.

I like the idea that his hands are tense.

Are you happy enough with that?

Using a projector, they copy the image directly onto the wall.

It's a rough outline, that's all you are going to get.

There's an old saying here, and it's legend in Gaelic, and it's,

"Mol an Oige agus Tiocfaidh si',"

and it means, "Praise the youth, and they will blossom."

Let's do the shoe now.

We'll put more detail on this later on.

Danny gets to work on the image he came up with at the meeting

with Devon Thomas.

The reason I'm doing this big yellow sky is because,

as Devon explained to us...

you know...they originated,

not even from the Caribbean, but from Africa.

They were taken there as slaves, so I'm trying to create the beautiful

African sky. As we did with Miles today, hopefully tomorrow we're

going to set up a shot where Devon's friend will be the man

with the watering can.

The roots may spell something relevant, I don't know,

like justice, like truth, something like that.

That sounds a bit arty-farty, doesn't it, you know what I mean?

Just two more days to finish the murals before they are shown

to an invited audience at Goldsmiths.

Then they'll be taken to the Stephen Lawrence Centre for Stephen's mother, Doreen, to have a look.

To find out more about the New Cross fire,

the artists meet Michael La Rose.

His father helped organise an historic protest,

the Black People's Day of Action, in March 1981.

As you can see, an important part of it was the names

and birth dates and the day they died.

Many were furious at the police handling of the case that

resulted in the deaths of the 13 young people.

It was the largest mobilisation of the Afro-Caribbean community

ever seen in Britain, before or since.

Over 20,000 people marched from the scene of the fire in New Cross

to central London, with the slogan,

"13 dead, nothing said."

Our children are suffering. They are crying for help.

The police are not reformed and they're still not reformed.

Deaths in custody continue,

the false arrests continue, stop and search still continues.

-Apparently stop and search is on the rise again.

-Yes, it is.

The New Cross fire is an important element of the mural,

but so, too, is Tayla's concern about stop and search.

I have seen the police just targeting young people,

mainly black boys that are riding bikes.

If there's a lot of them, then they put on their sirens,

and stop the car, then all jump out, even dogs, everything.

I can identify with it, it happened to me,

when I was growing up, back home.

We were stopped probably more than five times a day, you know.

So, I can totally identify with that,

and because my father was an ex-prisoner...

..whenever I was younger,

certain police officers went out of their way to make my life

difficult, even... I would've been younger, even, than Taylor.

Can you get George just to take up that position?

What do you think about the expression? Do you want him to smile?

You're right, Victoria, the smile just makes it.

We do a lot of stuff together,

but we're still working on our own stuff.

I'm still a Loyalist,

they're still Republican, so there's

things that they would paint that I wouldn't paint, and vice versa,

although with different politics,

there are things we agree on and...

So you can get along with each other,

you're not that different, like, you're different in what you

believe in, but you're not that different,

you're both the same, really.

Sweep it up from the taper.

You see, we're not sure of a line, if you can't...

Yeah, that's why I left that one.

Aye, don't bother, just go for the strong ones.

As the artists are finding out, this mural project is about much more

than the aftermath of the New Cross Fire.

Memories of the Stephen Lawrence murder still linger.

This was a black kid.

If it had been a white kid,

I know that it would have been dealt with differently.

Stephen was killed by a racist gang,

you had racist police who were investigating his murder,

and, you know, we as a family had to live through the trauma.

We were investigated ourselves, so we weren't seen as victims,

we were seen as perpetrators.

Doreen knows first hand the power of street art.

A few years ago, Danny

and Marty painted a mural in North Belfast of her son Stephen

with 25-year-old Robert Hamill,

who was beaten to death by a Loyalist mob in Portadown in 1997.

It was quite humbling to get to meeting Doreen Lawrence herself.

When she realised that it was actually myself

and Marty who had painted murals about her son

and how the issues affecting his death, in my head anyway,

she endorsed the project of that I was becoming involved in.

I've got the picture hanging up in my house of both Stephen and Robert.

I can't help but always reflect on the two young men,

who had so much to give, but yet their lives were cut short.

Midway through day two and work grinds to a halt.

Victoria Ogun feels the young people aren't being listened to.

-The whole point of it was for us to get our ideas across to you...

-Absolutely.

And... you have done that... the policing, yeah,

that's what we think, yeah, but it looks like youths

are against police and the police are against youths.

There is good police and bad police.

Wee Victoria has got lots of stuff here, and I'm sure yous have, too.

Do you want to take 20 minutes to decide here?

Some of them are idiots and they wear their big bomber jackets...

But some...

It's a pivotal moment, as the children find their voice

and take control.

Your wee slogan, read that slogan out for us again that you came up with.

"If I've done the crime, I'll do the time,

"but not because of my clothing line."

That is a mural alone, that slogan is a mural.

See the one that Marty's working on - do you think that would

work if we put that clothing on those three kids, and used your slogan?

That ties in, doesn't it?

We have got ideas from our own knowledge,

and what we feel should be there, because, really, the painting

is supposed to be about us, and how young people are treated.

Everyone has separate ideas, but we need to, like, blend our ideas together.

Can any of yous remember what the door number was of the house?

Yeah, the door number was 439.

What about if we put that number in the policeman's badge?

That is a great idea.

Yeah, I think we should do that?

Do yous think that's OK?

Yes, that's really good.

They're halfway through,

and Mark is anxious about the unveiling at the end of the week.

The families are coming in the next 48 hours to view...

..what we have done. I'm a wee bit nervous about it,

because I'm not sure what sort of reaction we're going to get.

Even though I'm not wanting to offend the families,

there's probably still going to be people offended by what I'm

doing out there, but really,

I think the issue is too important to go silent.

With just over one day left, the new ideas are starting to take shape.

If you're OK with that, you see if we do this

and we get this right, you'll be back here, you'll be painting

it on a big wall over there, with these young people.

That would be good, wouldn't it?

That's if we get this right.

One contentious issue emerges -

the portrayal of the fire victims' faces.

It's a subject that strikes a personal chord with Mark.

I think if they walked in

and seen a picture of their child, it would incite anger.

Why?

Because I just think it's...

I lost my son, he died when he was 14,

and if I walked in and seen a photograph of him,

it's different seeing text and it's a name, but if I...

It's too emotive... Do you know what I mean? ..and I would be angry at

the person for doing that, because they're making me feel that way.

My world was just turned on its head when I lost my son.

It was certainly a very dark cark, and still is.

Very raw. For myself, and for my family.

If someone had been coming to do an art piece around suicide...

..and I walked into a studio

and I seen a picture of my son on the wall,

and no-one had told me

and no-one had asked me,

I would have to say, first and foremost, it would have knocked me

off my feet, I would've been shocked

and then I would have been angry.

What this campaign has done is very similar,

almost exactly, what we do in our campaigns back home.

Bloody Sunday, the pictures of those people, they're real people,

they aren't just words on a list, somewhere,

they're real people,

that man had a baldy head, that guy there had a Beatle haircut

that looked like my uncle.

They brought those people to life.

I'm speaking from experience. If I walked in and seen

a picture of my wee lad there and wasn't expecting it,

I'd be fucking furious.

The families were involved, at Bloody Sunday,

the families knew the pictures were going to be...

The families are involved in this.

-These people don't know what to expect...

-Mark!

-You're jumping... Are you trying to say...

-Hold on, hold on.

Don't get excited. Are you trying to say...

You're forgetting they don't want us to fucking do this.

There were objections, there was a woman was quite angry that it

was being made into fucking artwork in the first place.

Who wants to be controversial and in your face,

and tell people, "We do this back home"?

Who's worse for doing that?

No, I'm doing that because of the injustice that was done.

-Thank you.

-Can you see a child anywhere?

Sensitively is the key to this...

Can you see a child anywhere?

-I'm very sorry, I wanted to get your advice...

-That was why...

-You're not listening.

-No, you're not listening.

That was why my link to it was a door number.

-No, sorry.

-I'm going for a smoke, we can talk about it outside.

No, they want to capture all this...

We do it all the time, you want to see us off camera!

This is the process, boys.

There'll be too many bleep, bleep, bleeps, you know what I mean?

I think that's what's good about a partnership with any creative

piece of work, I mean I've painted friends on the walls,

people I grew up with.

What really impacted on me was the people behind me, when I was

painting a mural, they were actually discussing

the lives of these people I was painting.

And so, my friends who I was painting were coming to life again.

OK, erm, basically we have some ideas, yeah,

and we were talking about...

The children have further thoughts,

and it is decided to link the three murals into one.

The flowers are going to blend into the next two paintings...

And after all the arguing,

it's the teenagers who come up with a decision about how best to

represent the victims, and there's going to be no faces.

Flowers, instead of just having a straight line as the stem,

the stem could be the name of the families.

So it's not three separate murals, it's one.

The children decided and...

we sort of just obeyed,

we done what we were told.

With a new hierarchy established and deadlines looming,

Tayla and Victoria give Marty his orders.

So we're going to put it on each three boys,

because "14 dead, nothing said" is going to go at the bottom.

Yes, that's great, that will work great.

Every mural I've ever painted, it changes in the process.

So, that's always the way.

It's kind of nerve-wracking that we have to show it,

but I think it's really good, and I think it will build people's

confidence in showing their artwork,

cos normally, back at school,

we just hide it when the teacher wants to see it.

It's the day before the mural is revealed to

members of the local community.

The children have had to return to school,

and John drops by to check up on progress.

I think it's beginning to really take shape now.

What I'm really pleased about is a combination between where the

artists had their ideas and brought them into the painting,

pretty early on in the process,

but it's quite clear now that the young people's ideas are predominant.

I think probably the most controversial image is the police officer, obviously,

with the anger in that police officer,

I mean, what question does that pose for the Metropolitan Police?

Who was it that talked about this slogan here, "If we do the crime..."

-Wee Victoria invented it, she came up with it...

-But did she invent that?

-Yes, it was like a wee rap...

-Oh, yeah?

Because if she invented that, she should be doing copywriting.

The young people described themselves yesterday no longer as young

people from southeast London, they described themselves as artists.

It's Friday morning, crunch time.

The day dozens of schoolchildren, community leaders

and members of the public get to see the mural.

Time for everyone involved to find out

if all the hard work has paid off.

I would like to hand you over to my friend and fellow artist,

Tayla.

Over this past week, I have learned the history of art,

the history of Northern Ireland,

the history of the Afro-Caribbean background in this local area.

But the most important thing, that I think we learnt was how

a picture, how the power of a picture can be used to raise awareness.

Disappointingly, none of the New Cross fire victims' family members turn up.

They've yet to see the mural.

The mural is later taken to the Stephen Lawrence Centre,

where the murdered black teenager's mother, Doreen, gets her first look.

What gave you the idea....

And an explanation from Tayla, Dariyen and Victoria.

Well, like, the police, they discriminate against people and it's

like nobody really says anything about it,

but this painting says a lot.

My first impression of the mural was

how amazing, and how they

seem to have captured and seem to tell so many different stories.

And the watch symbolises the time, it's different times where they

keep getting stopped because of the clothes that they're wearing.

There was just an amazing capture of how young people

feel about what's happening to them here in London.

Another question is around the chains,

and the chain's broken - what was that a symbol of?

The silence that is being going round is now broken by the doves.

Art is one way of helping young people to challenge what's

happening out in society.

Not many people, young kids growing up, really know about the New Cross fire,

and as years go by, you just get less and less people talking

about, but these young people should be told

and have the chance of understanding of what is racism and the

extent of what racism can happen when the community is so divided.

I have to say it was one of the hardest murals I've ever

worked on, because the feelings

and the sense of injustice around it are still very, very much there.

I would hope that the legacy of this project is that the young people

take the knowledge, that they have

and bring into their own community, bring it on to the streets,

and they WILL mobilise and they will demand a voice

and they will find a wall and they will paint a picture.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd