Art can show us not just what our cities look like, but what they could become

Artists have always played a muti-layered role within cities: as recorders of its inhabitants, as users of its unloved quarters and as campaigners for a better urban environment. A new exhibition by the artist Ed Gray in Spitalfields captures that ongoing, positive process.

Cities have always attracted artists. The gathering of influential and wealthy people makes them potential markets. The diversity within the population and the range of physical and social environments throw up opportunities to record the events and people whether on canvas, sculpture or through sound and vision.

Often this lends itself to images that evoke the beauty of the city, such as Claude Monet’s impressionist oil paintings of Waterloo Bridge, including this sunset painting held by the National Gallery of Art in the US. The British rock bank The Kinks left their own take on that scene with the song Waterloo Sunset.

Artists are also well placed to record the more mundane reality of living in a city. The painter LS Lowry preserved the image of life in the industrial districts of the north west of England in the first half of the last century. This factory-scape sold for £2.65 million at auction in 2020. Again a musical take, by artists Bryan and Michael who secured a number one with Matchstalk Men & Matchstalk Cats & Dogs, burnt the memory onto a new generation.

When artists find that the grim actuality of daily life in the city is actually harming its citizens, they are often motivated to use their skills to put these manifest injustices in front of the eyes of both the public and politicians.

One of the most famous British purveyors of that style is William Hogarth, whose satirical work included representations of the South Sea Bubble financial crisis, the fate of a young country girl fatally pulled into prostitution in London, and nefarious political practices around elections in the so-called Rotten Boroughs (An Election Entertainment can be seen at London’s Royal Academy).

He also used his painting to highlight animal cruelty and most famously, perhaps, the rising problem of alcoholism. His drawings Beer Lane and Gin Lane, which shows a drunk women letting her baby fall to its death, was published in support of the Gin Act of 1751 that banned gin distillers selling to unlicensed merchants.

An artist with a current small exhibition in London is Ed Gray, who says he draws on Lowry and Hogarth as well as on William Blake, Titian and Beryl Cook among many others. He has produced a large volume of street scenes of London (as well as other cities and regions around the world).

I was fortunate enough to attend one of his tours of recent work in a 1705 former Huguenot home off Brick Lane in Spitalfields called the House of Annetta, which is now a centre for research, arts and solidarity work.

Although Gray has painted hundreds of pictures of London, the show focuses on a series of paintings portraying events in the city had a major impact at the time and whose effects will likely linger through the years.

One of the star attractions of the show called Scenes of Innocence & Experience — a reference to Blake — was a visualisation of a clash between protectors campaigning for and against Brexit. It captures elements of that fierce debate, with flags, posters, fancy dress and guest appearances by Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and the English Defence League. The piece is, however, balanced.

Others in the series include Ode to Torsion, St Thomas’s Hospital that encapsulates the strain that the National Health Service has been under intense stress from Covid-19, underfunding and industrial action. Another features the mayhem, sometime funny but also occasionally threatening, outside Wembley Stadium ahead of the UEFA Euro 2020 final.

The positively of his paintings lie in the diversity of the characters involved and emotions that they can convey, as well as the way that they use humour and caricature to highlight the symptoms of our modern urban lifestyle. They also succeed in combining a personal subjective experience of the city with links towards important local and national political issues.

As one observer of East End life, Spitalfieldslife.com, has put it, Gray’s work captures the tumultuous street life of the capital superlatively as his images include scores of diverse characters that “delight in the multiple dramas of daily existence”. Pictures are also an immediately accessible format in a way that a peer-reviewed journal can never be. (The show continues until 6 November.)

Artists cannot create sustainable cities but by focusing on the realities of city life and the way that their governance systems desperately need improvement, they can show not just how cities are, but what they could be with a bit more tender loving care.