What Do Street Art and Pubs Have in Common

(Photography of Reprezent Project's work by Ash Ford-McAllister)

If you’ve passed the Iron Duke site in Great Yarmouth in the past year, you’ll have seen the decorative site hoarding panels around the outside.

These panels were created with community engagement by Reprezent Project, who also organised the first Mural Jam, which took place on the seafront behind Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach on Saturday 5th September 2026, and saw over 60 street art artists from the UK and overseas turn up to make art and build community.

Building community is also the core function of pubs.
Which means pubs and street art go together like pie and mash (to draw from the British “pub grub” associations!)  That’s part of why photography by City College Norwich A-Level students, supported by professional photographer Debby Besford, showing the Iron Duke when the process of restoration first started, are showcased alongside the work of the street artists.

Street art is about people who are often unheard taking space for their insights, observations, opinions, challenges, and criticisms -  pubs provide that same space.

Street art is effortlessly diverse; it brings together people from different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences, enabling very different people to learn about each other, understand experiences that aren’t their own experiences, and discover how many challenges, frustrations, and sources of amusement are genuinely universal.  Pubs also enable a wide range of people to be in the same room; to overhear and join in conversations, to notice things about the people they want to become, to hear the reality of lives they’ve made assumptions about - and discover that the people drinking champagne and those drinking the cheapest lager available often share the same anxieties, ambitions, and attitudes.

Street art has been part of human society since the time humans started forming societies, rather than just focusing their lives within their own family groups, starting with cave paintings, and moving through the more recognisable and elaborate street art of ancient Rome.  Getting together for communal drinking has equally been a consistent aspect of the human social experience. Descartes might have believed we’re human because we think - but it could equally be said we’re human because we get together to drink, and because we make art.

(image credits: Wikipedia, Forbes)

The Iron Duke is being restored in line with its original Art Deco design, including Art Deco-inspired artworks, created in community, which will be displayed inside the pub, and a traditional pub sign, created by contemporary artisans.  Art - and art as controversy - is inherently tied to the Art Deco era of the 1930s, when the prominent art style was surrealism (think Dali, Dada, et al); art which has a lot in common, stylistically, with contemporary street art, and art which, like contemporary street art, was not universally accepted as an artform - the German establishment of the mid-1930s denounced surrealism as “degenerate” art, insisting that the only ‘real’ and ‘acceptable’ art was classical art.  The German establishment of the mid-1930s actually held two separate exhibitions, one of “appropriate, admirable” art, and the other of “degenerate” art…it was supposed to be a “compare and contrast” - people would see the “degenerate” art, and be appalled by it, and flock to the classical and classically-inspired art…that…wasn’t exactly what happened…  

 The cultural dispute between what art “counts” as “real” art has essentially always been present.  Academic and Establishment discourse which derides “pub commentators” and “armchair economists” has also been a significant part of our cultural experience.  The idea that there are “real XYZs, and their work/opinion is acceptable, valuable, and relevant, and then there are those people over there, and they don’t know what they’re doing/talking about, and you shouldn’t indulge them” has always been a not-so-subtle background noise in Western society, and probably will always be with us.   

 Street artists take the “pub commentary” out of the pub and into the public.

1930s culture is also strongly associated with a variety of dance and music styles - particularly swing and jazz, with the fashions linked to those dance styles.  Pubs have always been excellent places for music, whether it’s an amateur jam session, a karaoke night, or a live music night led by professional musicians. 
There’s a lot of contemporary concern about the homogeneity of fashion, and the way everything is becoming almost identical, with very little space for self-expression. Part of that may be that people feel there’s nowhere to wear highly individual outfits that they’re genuinely excited by - and, while we may not have dance halls the way we did in the 1930s, we do still have pubs. Treat your local as your catwalk - dress to start new conversations whenever you drop in for a pint or a cup of coffee!

(Image credit: Chicago Dance Society)

Something that also came to define the 1930s was the Great Depression, which was also the time that public criticism through mainstream media of “dead-end kids” - the young adults of the urban working class - started to become a dominant narrative. In the 1960s and 1970s, when street art first started to emerge from more casual graffiti, it was heavily associated with urban youth gangs.  Likewise, pubs also have a strong association with urban, working class populations, even though they are genuine cultural and class melting pots, and also often an anchor in the lives of rural communities, where they frequently serve core functions, as Post Offices, general stores, drop in centres for community and social services support, staging posts for community organising, etc. Indeed, the overlaps between street art and pubs make them natural partners.

Street art is different from graffiti, although they are often held to be the same thing (for a quick overview of the distinction; graffiti tends to be one-dimensional, while street art is almost three-dimensional, with a full complexity of work behind it.  Graffiti is often something that is done in isolation, while street artists tend to be highly collaborative, and very social, even if they also build their own individual brand and presence.

Pubs and street art both centre the stories of people within their communities. Street art is inspired by the area it is created in, whether the literal visual impression of that area, or an artist’s impression of the place.  Pubs are “locals” - the immediate-vicinity meeting place for residents of an area.

Street art can provoke new ways of seeing an overly-familiar space. It can serve as a visual overview of an area for visitors to an area, and those moving to the area from outside. The nearest pub is also the first port of call for those moving to an area for the first time. They’re a good way for visitors to get a sense of the personality of an area, as well as often providing accommodation and information on good places to visit in the area for visitors.

Tourism is a large part of pubs’ transition from being seen as undesirable spaces to central elements of the economy of place.  As pubs started to consider that they might be visited by people who weren’t part of the community, and presenting themselves in a way which made that community seem more appealing,the pubs became more attractive to the local population, too, and began to make more money. 
Similarly, as street art moves away from its associations with casual graffiti, it has the potential to significantly boost tourism, and therefore income into local areas. Coastal towns like Great Yarmouth need tourism boosts. They need things which will attract tourists who consider the traditional British seaside resort to be ‘boring’, ‘old-fashioned’; people who wouldn’t normally go to the coast for a day trip, much less a full holiday.  Street art has the potential to be that new tourism draw.