One of may favourite things about Brighton is the street art. And if I had to pick a favourite graffiti artist it would be Dean.
Visually, Dean’s work was unexciting. He was a tagger who wrote his name in large black and white capitals. The beauty in his work was in the places where he put them. Some were obvious, drawn on railway bridges, or most notably, on Anston House. Others were harder to find.
(Anston House is famous as the most ugly building in Sussex and has been derelict for years now. For a while it was decorated with colourful portraits but even they did little to cheer it up. Following a murder, it has been surrounded by high fences. When I was a boy, my Dad worked there and I remembered visiting his office, seeing the computers in the basement. I remember rows of hanging magnetic tape and piles of punchcards)
Dean sometimes hid his tag. I remember one in a derelict building on the Steine. Another was described to me by a friend as a ‘Winter Dean’. It was on a brick wall on railway land near New England Road, hidden by trees and the only time you could see it was after the leaves had fallen.
I don’t know who Dean was. Some long deleted message board had a thread where someone saying that tag was a memorial to a graffiti artist who died fleeing the police. Another forum said that “he had great reach but a poor tag”. Seeing the name around the town made me happy and it became a game, with people swapping new ones they’d noticed. Dean was even mentioned in an edition of the Cheeky Guide. There are still a few Deans around the town but before long they will all be gone.
Travelling to London as a commuter, I always looked up for the view across the Ouse Valley viaduct. And one day I spotted it, painted on a feeding trough. Someone had come out here, in the middle of nowhere, to paint their mark where train-travellers could see it. The care and thought amused me, brightened up a part of that journey.
I was also fascinated by DEAN. When new to Brighton, over thirty years back, his tag was something I initially dismissed as a bit lame. Apart from a far more refined piece on an old railway freight carriage that was a permanent fixture in the sidings of Brighton station, his tags struck me as unremarkable. It was his tenacity that eventually spiked my fascination to the point that I assigned a photo-journalist (was once a picture editor) to do a story about the extraordinary reach of Dean’s work. We even had a lead on his whereabouts, but it came to nothing.
Fascination turned to passive obsession, as I marvelled at the amount of places, and the distance he was prepared to cover, to sign his tag. From the viaduct outside Haywards Heath I noticed a metal cow-trough in the field signed Dean. There was another at East Croydon station and I’m almost certain he reached London Bridge!
While the art was below average, the lengths that he was prepared to go to, the risks he must have taken, and the distances travelled were extraordinary.
He also made me smile many times when I chanced upon his work in unexpected places.
Then I noticed the works beginning to fade. I stopped spotting new tags anywhere – something that had been a great pleasure to me – and the legend passed into distant memory.
It’s so nice to read your piece about this Enigmatic street artist.
May he rest in peace, spray gun hidden, part of Brighton history.
Thank you so much for sharing this – please can you share (publicly or privately) something more about the lead you once had on Dean?