Hackney, E8
Murals are unfashionable, and peace murals commissioned by loony-left councillors at the height of their self-indulgent assault on the Thatcher government are perhaps most unfashionable of all. Yet the Hackney Peace Carnival Mural in London, created between 1983 and 1985 and now threatened with demolition, really ought to be saved. It is a fascinating work, a grand exercise in figurative painting which lifts your heart, or at least provokes your curiosity, as you see it adorning the entire side of a house in Dalston Lane, a few yards east of Balls Pond Road. It not only captures the spirit of a bygone age, but also reminds us that things which only 17 years ago would still have struck conservative-minded people as outlandish to the point of absurdity have become entirely normal.
The foreground of the vast composition shows a band of about 16 musicians. The group is multiracial, a characteristic which in 1985 would still have been seen by many people as a form of left-wing propaganda, an attempt to preach the virtues of immigration and multiculturalism.
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