Mooch with Gooch
CRICKET fans can enjoy some banter with England batting legend Graham Gooch on a cruise to Scandinavia. Iglu Cruise has the week-long full-board break on Crown Princess from £931, saving £329 and sailing from Southampton on May 27. You will be bowled over with stop-offs in Bruges, Copenhagen, Helsingborg and Oslo. Call 0203 733 5557 or go to iglucruise.com. THANKS to Banksy, street art has s the power to put places on the map. And a new Lonely Planet guide highlightss the best graffiti around the globe, from Berlin to Bristol. The East End has always been a creative melting pot. Today the dockworkers and seamstresses have been replaced by hipsters and fashionistas.
What started as a guerrilla movement – spray cans in the dead of night – is now a major tourist attraction. In Shoreditch in particular, three specialist art tours set out on an almost daily basis. You can learn the difference between street art and graffiti. Street artists reach out to the public, while graffiti writers tag spaces for their own kicks. HOW TO DO IT: Sign up for one of Dave Stuart’s tours – shoreditchstreetarttours.co.uk, £15pp. The chilled, easy-living city in the west, the birthplace of the mysterious Banksy, is a street art mecca. The downtown dockland area plus postwar reconstruction is a perfect canvas.
Much of the year-round work is in Stokes Croft and Bedminster. Every year Bedminster hosts Upfest – Europe’s largest street art and graffiti festival. The “UP” stands for Urban Paint and 300 artists from across the globe do their stuff over a summer’s weekend. HOW TO DO IT: This year’s Upfest, upfest.co.uk, runs from July 29-31. There’s an archive of 700-plus pieces of work, including Banksy, on bristol-street-art.co.uk. The East Side Gallery is one of the early examples of street art becoming iconic. Images of an East German car bursting through the wall, and East German president Honecker kissing Soviet leader Brezhnev, went global in 1990. And today the gallery section of the wall is one of Berlin’s top tourist attractions.
A thriving counterculture and abundance of abandoned buildings led to no end of work, particularly in Mitte – head for the edgy urban collective in Haus Schwarzenberg – and Kreuzberg – the Mauerpark. Even on the rail route in from Schoenefeld airport you’ll see huge murals softening industrial buildings. HOW TO DO IT: Lots of airlines fly to Berlin – easyjet.com, ryanair.com. Rooms start at £60 at Hotel Mani, amanogroup.de, in Mitte. The Big Apple is recognised as the birthplace of modern graffiti, so it is no surprise street art has flourished here too.
Most of the big stuff is over in places such as Brooklyn and the Bronx, but the Lower East Side of Manhattan has some good pieces around the SoHo area. As a sign of how street is rapidly becoming mainstream, the new One World Trade Center building has a 27 metre mural by Brooklyn based artist José Parlá. HOW TO DO IT: British Airways Holidays britishairways.com has a flight plus three nights in a hotel from £549pp. Given its liking for both the arts and the avant-garde, Paris is a happy hunting ground for street artists. A couple of years ago, a ten-storey building in the 13th arrondissement, a working-class district in south-east Paris, was transformed into an art gallery just before being demolished. Since then, art has spread through the district’s streets.
Closer to the centre, the Place Igor Stravinsky, j just around the corner from the Pompidou Centre, features stunning water fountains from artist Niki de Saint Phalle against a backdrop of h huge murals. HOWH TO DO IT: Lastminute.com has a range of packages that link up Eurostar with a variety of Parisian hotels, with prices from £245pp for a o one-night stay. This modern Canadian metropolis is home to some 230 different nationalities and such c cultural diversity is a fertile ground for