Steve Russell, graffiti defeater

Steve Russell is like Sisyphus or, depending on your literary tastes, Phil Connors of Groundhog Day. A specialist graffiti cleaner at Westminster city council, he’s summoned to scrub, dissolve and paint over the city’s scrawlings whenever members of the public make a complaint. 

Often, he’ll spend the whole day painstakingly removing a piece, only to wake up the following day and find it resprayed. When out on a multi-day job beneath the Westway — the same underpass where the US artist Futura left London’s first piece of bubbly, New York-style graffiti in 1981 while touring with The Clash — the artist whose work Steve was painting over returned night after night to redo it. This went on for several days. “Eventually, I said to the council, look: this just isn’t going to work”, he says frustratedly, a rare time when he had to admit defeat. 

Responsible for removing much of the graffiti around Westminster, Steve also makes call-outs when other local authorities need a pair of expert hands. It’s delicate work, with different surfaces and paints requiring tailored approaches. Typically, he’ll work on multiple pieces simultaneously; applying a solvent in one spot before dashing several streets away to do some painting, before returning several hours later once the chemicals have had time to take effect. 

We meet in Soho on a dull and grey December morning, the kind where the sun never seems to rise more than a few feet off the ground. Tanned, with a gold hoop earring and a frayed baseball cap pulled tight over peroxide blonde hair, Steve swiftly spots a problem with the site Westminster council have called him to. “Well obviously I’m not going to use these here”, he says matter of factly, gesturing to a little red bucket filled with chemical solvents.

The wall in question is coated in paint — 25 layers of it, left by none other than Steve himself while on previous jobs. Applying a solvent would only reveal the graffiti beneath.