10FOOT + TOX + FUME 'Tunnel Block' Print Available

Artist: 10FOOT + TOX + FUME
Title: Edition
Medium: Multi Color Screen Print
Size: 70 x 50 cm
Edition: 97
Price: £750

Graffiti legend 10FOOT is the working name of a British street artist who has spent over three decades turning city walls into monumental tributes to character based spray art. Emerging from the Bristol scene during the early 1990s, he adopted the tag as a literal goal, aiming to paint cartoon figures ten feet tall using nothing but steady hand control and standard caps. His early pieces featured bulbous, smiley creatures with sausage limbs and star shaped pupils, rendered in candy colours that popped against grey concrete. Over time the style evolved into sleek, chrome plated robots, melting clocks and psychedelic dragons, yet the playful scale and crisp outline work remained constant.

Working without stencils or projections, 10FOOT relies on freehand technique, sketching a loose skeleton in diluted paint then building form through layered fills, fades and highlights. A single wall can take several days, with each session documented for Instagram followers who track the transformation from blank brick to glossy storybook. Recent works incorporate metallic leaf and transparent glazes, allowing daylight to shimmer across scales, bolts and bubbles.

Despite gallery interest, he prefers the street, describing legal walls as “giant sketchbooks for the public.” Murals in Manchester, London, Barcelona and New York have become pilgrimage spots for writers and photographers, while limited print releases sell out online within minutes. Workshops with youth groups keep the craft alive, passing on can control and colour theory to a new generation.

Whether painting a five storey robot or a tiny doorway mouse, 10FOOT approaches every surface with the same mission: spread colour, spark wonder and prove that imagination can still tower over the urban landscape.

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TOX is the tag of a London graffiti writer whose stark four letter signature has become one of the city most visible and contested marks. Active since the late 1990s, TOX began as a teenager armed with stolen tins and a marker, hitting bus windows, shop shutters and tube carriage interiors with a relentless repetition that baffled commuters and infuriated authorities. His style is deliberately raw: a simple rounded font executed in one colour fills and thick black outlines, often accompanied by the current year and nothing more. No characters, no elaborate backgrounds, just the name repeated until it burns into public memory.

This minimalist approach turned TOX into a polarising figure. To graffiti purists his dedication to quantity over aesthetics is a pure expression of the culture core value: get your name up at all costs. To city officials he became public enemy number one, cited in Parliament and blamed for inspiring copycat scrawls across the capital. In 2011 he received a 27 month prison sentence for criminal damage, a punishment that elevated his tag from street nuisance to symbol of urban rebellion.

Despite intensive surveillance, the identity behind TOX remains officially unconfirmed, allowing the mark to function as both personal signature and anonymous collective act. Photographs of faded TOX tags on brickwork, bridges and bins now circulate as archaeological evidence of London’s restless energy, while art collectors frame peeled stickers bearing the infamous four letters.

Whether viewed as vandalism or folk art, TOX output demonstrates the power of sheer persistence. By refusing to beautify or explain, he forces the city to confront its own surfaces, turning every wall into a contested page where legality, visibility and memory collide in spray painted shorthand.

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FUME stands as one of London’s most resolute underground marksmen. Born and bred within the five square mile rectangle that edges the Hammersmith and City line, he began writing in April 1992 and has since covered the capital’s steel and brick with unmissable four letter throw ups. Operating under the DDS crew banner, he helped shape the city’s train bombing culture, often targeting the porous metal of vintage carriages that absorbed paint like a time capsule.

His style is raw and immediate: big, blocky capitals sprayed in high contrast colours, outlined once and left unadorned. There is no finesse of wild style, only the blunt declaration that FUME was here, a signature repeated so relentlessly that even power washing cannot erase the ghost left behind. Despite mainstream graffiti drifting toward legal walls and gallery spaces, he has stayed loyal to trackside spots and sidings, claiming above ground feels ugly compared with the forgotten tunnels where old tags still stain the girders.

Recent studio experiments translate that tunnel dust into gallery works, sprinkling genuine tube grime onto canvases coated with spray glue, then overlaying fresh tags and spectral platform figures. The pieces retain the coarse palette of aerosol caps, yet the inclusion of pulverised brick and metal filings embeds London’s infrastructure directly into the surface.

FUME avoids social media, gives no interviews and signs nothing except his name, preserving the mystique that once made graffiti figures semi mythic. Through sheer consistency he has turned simple letters into an urban constant, proving that in an age of permissioned murals the most potent statement is still an illegal tag repeated until it becomes part of the city’s heartbeat.