Making marks, changing values: The contemporary significance of graffiti at historic sites

This collaborative research project with the University of York and English Heritage seeks to understand why historic graffiti matter and whether understanding graffiti creation today can help us to better understand mark-making in the past. For decades, graffiti scholarship has acknowledged how mark-making can inform our understanding of the contemporary world. Meanwhile, historic graffiti has been increasingly recognised as a valuable source of historic information, adding to or offering alternative narratives for heritage sites and revealing news stories which have previously been hidden. However, there is still further potential for historic and contemporary graffiti to be viewed as a form of archaeological and material evidence. Generally, the term ‘graffiti’ is often understood through its more modern definition which focuses on the negative connotations of this form of mark-making as evidence of anti-social or criminal behaviour. Despite this, ‘graffiti’ is a term rooted in archaeological practice. Rarely have the themes of historic and contemporary graffiti overlapped. This project takes this overlap as a starting point to open new areas of inquiry within historic and contemporary graffiti studies, and to help to acknowledge the complexities behind this, often-oversimplified, term.

This project looks at historic graffiti at a range of heritage sites within English Heritage’s national portfolio, whilst also exploring contemporary graffiti practice. In particular, the project focuses on analysing the visitor graffiti at Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire, and the marks made by detainees, soldiers and visitors in the 19th century cell block at Richmond Castle, North Yorkshire. In addition to the graffiti found in formal heritage sites, contemporary graffiti in the settings of Slaithwaite (West Yorkshire), the Fallowfield Loop (Manchester) and the Northern Quarter (Manchester), and graffiti created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, have been recorded and analysed as contemporary comparators. The project critically assesses how graffiti at historic sites and more contemporary examples can be evaluated and valued. It also explores how graffiti can be better understood as an archaeological resource for the study of the distant and recent past, helping us to see historic sites and contemporary spaces from new perspectives and to inform new interpretations.