'The Big Issue's 10Foot Takeover' goes back to its radical roots

Creative director Simon Moore suggests this is perhaps the most subversive act he’s seen in London in a long time, much like Big Foot itself...

In early January I was trudging down the A1011 in Canning Town, with my son, on my way to Wickes to purchase some “mulsh” so he could “buff” out a wall on Leake Street before doing a “burner” there (these are all graffiti terms that I pretend to understand).

It was at this point we spotted a freshly minted “10Foot 2025” on the side of the Newham Way, to which my son was delighted. I have always been slightly sceptical of the aesthetic merits of 10Foot, the work not really appealing to my high art pretensions but looking at the concrete brutalism of the Newham Way, I did think this act of urban subversion is probably an improvement.

Which brings us to the 10Foot takeover of The Big Issue.

To the uninitiated, 10Foot is a graffiti writer who has tagged bridges and walls the length and breadth of the country. To have been outed and “hated on” by The Daily Mail is not the badge of honour it once was, but 10Foot is still a figure that would be loathed by a huge swathe of the British public. Many people would consider what he does as mindless vandalism, presumably the same people who then purchase Keith Haring kids' t-shirts and hang up Banksy prints. His work is generally regarded as having little artistic merit, yet to a small subsection of society, he’s a hero, the Che Guevara of “bucket paint” (I know what that one means).

I’m old enough to remember the Big Issue starting. In the world of marketing, that’s the equivalent of saying you remember cars being invented. 

The Big Issue always felt dangerous, it had writers and ideas you didn’t see anywhere else. Most importantly, it was a form of publishing outside of the media giants with a distribution model unheard of before; at the time, that was radical thinking.

Everything about this issue brings it back to its radical roots, the type of ads (local ads that 10Foot paid for), the writers he’s championed (including the OG, Alan Moore and Kneecap the Irish rap Trio), and even the font was chosen by him. I’ve always been a big fan of the Situationists of the sixties, and this all feels like it follows in their proud tradition of disrupting and reimagining the systems that govern everyday life.

In an AI-driven world of bland sameness, where even ads don’t seem to have the same punch as they used to, this one simple publication seems to have pulled off the most subversive act I’ve seen in London in a long time.

To paraphrase Gil Scott-Heron, “the revolution will not be televised, it will be a printed magazine sold outside tube stations”.