The London Tunnel Banksy Turned Into the City’s Biggest Open Canvas

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In 2008, Banksy found a forgotten railway tunnel under Waterloo station. It was grey, damp, and used mainly as a car park access road. He got the council’s permission, invited 40 artists, and called it the Cans Festival. Three days later, Leake Street had become something London had never seen before: a place where covering the walls was not just tolerated — it was the entire point.

What Makes Leake Street Different

London has thousands of walls. Most of them you cannot touch. Leake Street is the exception.

The tunnel runs for about 300 metres under the railway arches of Waterloo station. Before 2008, it was unremarkable — grey, largely forgotten, somewhere between a service road and a dead end. Now it is covered from floor to ceiling in layered street art that changes constantly. Sometimes week to week. Sometimes day to day.

The council gave artists formal permission to paint here. Unlike the legal grey areas that street artists usually work in, Leake Street is official. You can walk in on a Tuesday afternoon and watch someone filling a wall with spray cans, entirely within their rights.

It is the only place like it in central London.

What the Cans Festival Was

Banksy did not hold a press conference. He did not write a press release or apply for grants. He quietly arranged the access, quietly invited artists from across Europe, and let them loose for three days in May 2008.

The rule was simple: stencil work only. No freestyle tagging. Banksy wanted to show what street art looked like when it had space to breathe — when it did not have to be rushed or hidden or painted over by someone else’s work before the spray dried.

Word spread fast. By the second day, hundreds of people were visiting to watch the work take shape. By the time it ended, every inch of the tunnel had been painted. The council looked at the result and decided to keep Leake Street as a permanent open space for artists.

That single decision changed the tunnel’s identity for good. One festival became a permanent institution, with no formal management, no entry fee, and no end date. It simply kept going.

What You Will Find There Today

Walk into Leake Street today and the scale of it hits you immediately. Walls stretching three or four metres high, covered top to bottom in portraits, characters, layered text, and intricate designs. The purple LED lighting that lines the ceiling gives the whole place an otherworldly quality that photographs struggle to capture fully.

Then you notice the people. Some are taking photos. Some are just passing through. And some are actively painting — quietly filling in a section of wall, spray can in hand, fully focused on the work.

That is still what Leake Street is for. Artists come from across the United Kingdom and from abroad to add their work to the collection. The only standing rule is that older work can always be painted over. Nothing is permanent. Everything changes.

Come back six months later and you will not recognise the walls. The tunnel is never the same twice, which is exactly why people keep returning.

The Unwritten Rules

For somewhere with very few official rules, Leake Street stays surprisingly orderly. The community has developed its own code over the years, informal but widely respected.

You do not paint over a finished, high-quality piece while the paint is still wet. You do not tag over a portrait. And if you are going to claim a large section of wall, you do something worth claiming it for.

The community watches. Artists who show up with nothing to add are quietly noticed. Those who produce something extraordinary earn a kind of respect that outlasts even the work itself — even after their piece has been painted over and replaced.

This is how street art culture has always worked. Leake Street just makes that culture visible to anyone who wanders through.

Leake Street and the Bigger London Picture

Leake Street is the most accessible example of London’s street art world, but it sits within a much larger tradition.

Shoreditch, in East London, has become a global reference for urban art, with walls covered by artists from every corner of the world. Brixton carries its own tradition, tied closely to the area’s history of creative resistance. Even quieter corners of the city — a railway arch in Peckham, a car park wall in Hackney — carry work that stops people in the street.

If Leake Street catches your attention, it is worth building time into your visit to explore further. A 3-day London itinerary is a useful starting point if you are planning your time in the city more broadly.

Leake Street also sits in rich cultural territory. Just a short walk from the tunnel, the South Bank stretches toward Shakespeare’s Southwark — a lawless creative district that has been attracting artists and performers for over 400 years. The connection between the two, across the centuries, is not as distant as it sounds.

London’s artistic counterculture has always found a way. This is the same city where the Rolling Stones played their early gigs on a small island in the Thames, far from the mainstream. The spirit that kept them going then is the same spirit that fills Leake Street every week.

When to Visit

Leake Street is open at all hours. There are no entry fees, no tickets, no queues, and no guided tours. You simply walk in.

Weekday mornings are quietest — a good time to look properly at the work and, if you are lucky, watch artists in action without the crowds. Weekends bring more visitors but also more activity. Evening is when the LED lighting comes fully into its own. The tunnel transforms after dark into something more dramatic, more atmospheric. Photographs taken at night have a different quality entirely.

One practical note: wear clothes you do not mind getting marked. Leake Street is a working space. Paint in the air is not unusual. Consider it part of the experience.

The nearest station is Waterloo, just a few minutes’ walk away. The tunnel entrance is on Leake Street itself, just off Lower Marsh.

You do not need to know anything about street art to understand what Leake Street is. Walk in with no expectations and you will still feel something — the scale of it, the colour, the quiet hum of creative energy. This city does not always give people permission to make things. But here, in this tunnel, it does. Always has. And for now at least, always will.

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