ANTI DECAY DECOR IN THE UK

By BOB WOFFINDEN

© New Musical Express
28 MAY 1977

S0 you've heard about inner city decay? The pressing need to make urban centres more environmentally attractive? After all, it's, practically government policy to reverse the '70s population trends away from the cities.

In this Jubilee year, who is helping to improve Britain's bleak expanses of urban desolation? The rock biz, naturally.
The murals pictured here are now on public view on the North-eastern side of the Shepherds Bush roundabout - at the end of Holland Park Avenue, just opposite the Kensington Hilton. You can hardly miss 'em.
They were painted by three members of Chelsea Art College; and commissioned by the manager of Steeleye Span, Tony Secunda, a kind of ageing enfant terrible in the area of outlandish publicity stunts.

But as with his other ideas - e.g. the £8,000 give-away at Steeleye's Hammersmith gig last November - Secunda has contrived a situation where his band is not the only beneficiary.

Theoretically Secunda should have applied for planning permission, but did not do so. He acquired only the sanction of the cafe proprietors of said wall, but after all, his activities indirectly helped to attain the very objectives that the council (in this case, the Royal Borough of Kensington And Chelsea) should have been seeking themselves. The site is now reason- ably attractive, and certainly colourful.

"The wall looked very ugly, with bits of wallpaper hanging off," said Secunda. "We had to fill the wall to level it off, and in the process we've made it completely watertight for the cafe owners.

The cost of the whole operation, which took only three days, was, Secunda reckons, about the same as for a full-page ad in NME.

He now has ideas for expansion, as well as plans to move north, and is eyeing suitable sites throughout the country, He presently has in mind a gigantic 300' by 60' space, as well as one wall which he has subsequently discovered is Crown property.

The Shepherds Bush murals have been hugely visible for a fortnight now (there is also a smaller version along the Harrow Road), and Secunda now anticipates no bureaucratic problems. "l think something would have happened by now if it was going to."

It is, in any case, unlikely that the council will take any precipitate action. When l rang them last week, it took them ten minutes to establish whether or not the walls in question were located in their borough. And they still haven't called back with the promised comment ...