To mark the release of Old So Kool, a comprehensive book documenting the forgotten UK graffiti subculture of the 1980s, a cohort of 15 street artists recently convened in Wolverhampton. The event took place at the Peel Street car park and its adjoining underpasses, a location long recognised within the community as a legal “Hall of Fame” for urban artists. Authorised by the local city council, this collaborative “paint jam” allowed both original 1980s creators and contemporary practitioners to produce new murals. These works were explicitly designed to pay homage to the clandestine aerosol art of four decades ago, bringing the aesthetics of a bygone era back to the city’s concrete infrastructure.
The Old So Kool project was compiled by Wolverhampton-based artist Paul Pilgrim (also known in the music and art communities as DJ Taz) and publisher Steven O’Hara. The initiative originally began as a digital preservation effort. Pilgrim, who started writing graffiti in 1985 as the hip-hop movement expanded from London into the West Midlands, founded the “80s Old Skool Graffiti” Facebook group. The forum successfully crowdsourced hundreds of unseen photographs directly from the personal photo albums and private sketchbooks – referred to by writers as “black books” – of former artists. These crowdsourced images, many of which had not been viewed publicly in over thirty years, formed the foundation of the first Old So Kool volume published in 2022.
The launch event at Peel Street underscored Wolverhampton’s deep historical ties to the 1980s urban art movement. During that decade, the city functioned as a crucial regional hub for early British graffiti. It served as the proving ground for prominent cultural figures such as the musician and artist Goldie (Clifford Joseph Price MBE), who grew up in the area. While most 1980s graffiti has been lost to time, much of Goldie’s early aerosol work remains physically preserved in the basement of Hawthorn House in the city’s Heath Town district. The Peel Street gathering deliberately aimed to reconnect this specific local legacy with the wider national documentation effort spearheaded by Pilgrim and O’Hara.
The physical publication of these photographs serves a vital archival purpose. Because graffiti is inherently ephemeral, the vast majority of the original 1980s street pieces documented in the book were either painted over by rival crews, removed by local authorities, or destroyed during urban redevelopment. O’Hara has noted that the book acts as a permanent physical testament to a period when artists operated entirely underground, often working through the night in train yards and subways to avoid arrest. The transition from these illegal, nocturnal activities to a city-sanctioned, daytime public event at Peel Street highlights the shifting civic attitudes towards street art. The medium has transitioned from being classified strictly as vandalism to becoming an acknowledged pillar of contemporary visual culture, mirroring the broader institutional acceptance seen in the careers of globally recognised figures like Keith Haring.
Following the unexpected commercial success of the initial 2022 release, which quickly sold through its initial print run of 1,000 copies and required immediate reprints, the Old So Kool project has expanded into a full trilogy. The compilers released the second volume, Old So Kool 2: The Lost Years, in December 2023, drawing on a massive overflow of submitted archival material that could not fit into the first edition. A third volume, subtitled Original Style Kreatorz, is currently slated for publication in July 2025. Pilgrim confirmed that the sheer volume of high-quality, undocumented work remaining in private collections guarantees sufficient material for these ongoing historical records, ensuring that the origins of the UK’s street art scene are definitively catalogued.
