10FOOT’s Greater Villain is From the History Books

To draw a through line between a graffiti practice, public space, homelessness and the Enclosure Acts of 18th and 19th century England should read like a massive undertaking. We live in times where history is hard to articulate, as turbo-charged supermodernity and the brevity of attention-spans leaves us with a vacuous understanding of our infrastructure and collective consciousness. But somehow, in the back of a sandwich shop in central London in May, I’m sitting with 10FOOT and we are discussing his first commissioned public sculpture, unveiled in Finsbury Park this past week as part of the Museum of Homelessness exhibition, Criminal: An Untold History of Homelessness, Resistance and Survival. The conversation is about this idea of a line, a connection, between graffiti and reclaiming public space, and the history of space being taken away from people that extends far beyond CCTV cameras and Orwellian-inspired laws. It’s a centuries-long process, and it shaped England and the modern world in more ways that can even be counted. 

Here is my understanding and research: The Enclosure Acts were a series of mostly private Parliamentary laws, passed chiefly in the 18th and early 19th centuries, that converted England’s traditional open fields, commons and waste shared by villagers into individually owned, fenced or hedged parcels. Rather than a single national policy, enclosure was implemented by thousands of local Acts that empowered commissioners to survey land, reallocate strips and rights, award compensation, and produce final maps and legal titles. 

Enclosures were implemented for several intertwined reasons. Landowners and agricultural improvers sought to increase productivity by consolidating scattered strips into compact farms, introducing new crop rotations, improving drainage and pastures, and reducing the costs of communal management. Economic pressures — rising grain prices, demand from growing towns, and the desire to invest capital in “improved” agriculture — made enclosure attractive. The private Act route allowed local elites to legalize changes that might otherwise have been resisted by customary rights-holders.

For working-class rural people the effects were profound. Many smallholders, cottagers and commoners lost customary rights to graze animals, collect fuel or glean, or to use strips that supported subsistence. Compensation under awards was frequently inadequate for the poorest, and the fragmentation of rights undermined reciprocal support networks. The most direct consequences were displacement and proletarianization: dispossessed rural people often became wage laborers on larger farms or migrated to towns and industrial centers in search of work, increasing seasonal and casual labor and dependence on poor relief.

By removing commons that underpinned subsistence and tenure for many rural households, enclosure pushed people into precarious employment or urban migration where overcrowded, inadequate housing and the breakdown of traditional support networks made rooflessness and transient lodging more common. That process interacted with earlier vagrancy traditions, parish poor-law regimes, and later industrial and housing-market pressures; enclosure may not have alone created homelessness, but it significantly reshaped rural society in ways that fed the growth of the persistent, urban homelessness that characterizes the modern era.

For the work that 10FOOT presented in Finsbury Park, this is an important historical moment and the basis of the work itself. The work is a tree surrounded by (he notes “caged”) by a three-spike fence. The tree itself, a hawthorn, is symbolic: hawthorns were commonly used to mark parish or field boundaries and meeting points for perambulations. Hawthorns have been featured in folk memory and protest narratives — cutting or planting a hawthorn could be an act with legal or symbolic force, and references to notable hawthorns appear in local accounts of disputes over enclosure. And now, in a public park in London, a conceptual work of art that traces the history of labor, of homes, of land, of space. 

In an interview with the Observer, 10FOOT said, “Museum of Homelessness is a rare institution that gives material solidarity. Art needs socio-political intent, especially at this moment. A lot of ‘art’ in London feels like homeware for the global elite.” 

What I was curious about when 10FOOT and I spoke was how this work was connected to his graffiti practice. The sculpture, conceptually and intellectually, and even the underground (literally) show he did last year in London, have a consistent connection as to why he has painted his name thousands upon thousands of times across this city and others for the better part of a decade. It’s about taking space, yes, but it's a conversation and connection between reclaiming a place. I see the line between the history of property and the ideas of property in the way his graffiti and those of his peers sprout up in often unseen or uncontextualized spaces. The public work, the history of the enclosures, the graffiti, all line up as a challenge to authority and to some power of law. It’s all in the same constellation. The new work in the park makes the graffiti make more sense, in a way.

I will say most of this is an idea I’m working out, a thought that was sparked, something that 10FOOT I think, too, is thinking through as to what graffiti to conceptual work could look like whilst remaining in public space. The Museum of Homelessness’ Criminal show seems to have come at the exact moment when far-right agendas have blamed immigrants and left-wing politicians for their version of urban blight. Someone needs to read their history books. —Evan Pricco