The walls are alive at the Olympic Park

Living Walls sees around 2.5km of hoarding coated with beautiful work from the likes of  Jeremy Deller, David Batchelor, Ben Eine, Jo Peel and David Shillinglaw, who created a ‘modern day Bayeux tapestry’ for the project.

The programme is made up of five main pieces, including Shillinglaw’s mural, which depicts the story of the park and the people that live around it, showing their tales from the announcement that London had won the Olympic bid to the event itself, and into the future of the space.

Artist Jo Peel’s piece is entitled Meet Me in the City. Her 200m mural focuses on Hackney Wick – an area that even in the last few years has been transformed from a strange, eerily dystopian collection of warehouses and battered ice-cream vans to an almost Shoreditch-like expanse of galleries and pubs serving chips on slabs of wood.

Peel’s work looks at the area’s industrial origins, with 30m of the piece showing a stop-motion animation that ‘tells a story of lost messages within the changing landscape of east London and how this feeds into people’s lives and the impact on them’, according to Living Walls organisers.

Ben Eine has contributed The Review – a 400m mural inspired by the V&A, and using his recognisable Victorian-style decorative typography to mediate on the plans for a for a new cultural quarter on Queen Elizabeth Park.

Elsewhere, artist Mark McClure has created a 210m-long piece called Uphoarding, which highlights ideas about recycling and sustainability through 10 ‘beacon’ vertical sculptures created using materials scavenged from Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and discarded film sets from nearby Sugar Mill Studios.

The opening project for Living Walls was Your Ad Here, which saw artists propose artwork advertising a local business, which had registered its interest in the project.

Living Walls will be in place for the next three to five years at the Queen Olympic Park, London E20 2ST