Plymouth's street art: from Toad Hall to the Barbican

Plymouth's walls have been busy. The latest addition to the city centre comes from Jordan Lauder, working under the name SpraySaint, who has painted a mural of the woodland creatures from The Wind in the Willows. The wall belongs to a resident who has since named her property 'Toad Hall', a nod to the River Tamar running behind it, which at high tide carries the water right up to the brickwork. The whole thing grew out of her seeing a stag mural on the side of Morley Court in the west end, which she described as "magnificent", and it grew from there: Lauder took the resident's illustrations and added willows, the countryside and the stream to round out the scene. There's a bit of a dispute over how long it took, with one source saying about six hours and another three and a half days, but the resident kept the artist going with chairs, tea and bacon butties throughout. It's a small, personal piece of work, but it fits right into a city that's quietly filling up with street art.

If you want to make a proper tour of it, the scale of the scene is worth knowing first. Over in Stonehouse, Roy Christie's St Mary Street mural runs a full 125 metres along St Mary's Street, taking you from deep water up to a reimagined Plymouth Sound, past a cityscape of the city's better-known landmarks and out onto rolling rural hills. It went up on 1 October 2025, so it's one of the newer big pieces. Then there's the Barbican mural at 5 Southside Street, on the back wall of the former studio of Robert Oskar Lenkiewicz, who worked in Plymouth before he died in 2002. It's a more challenging piece to take in: the theme deals with metaphysical ideas current in England between 1580 and 1620, the composition is loosely based on the Hebrew letter 'Aleph', and it's now significantly faded and damaged, with wooden battens fixed over the surface. It's Grade II listed, which is rare for a mural, and the listing dates back to 1975.

Beyond those three, the city's murals are spread across the places you'd already be walking past. There's work on the Old Custom House, the Royal Citadel, the Mayflower Steps, the Hoe and the Royal William Yard, so a lot of it doubles as a way to see the waterfront. The Mayflower Steps, at the bottom of the Barbican, are a stop in their own right: the current portico with its Doric columns of Portland stone was built in 1934, and it marks the spot from which the Pilgrim Fathers are believed to have left England on 6 September 1620. The original steps are long gone, so a granite block with the ship's name marks the approximate location, with a commemorative plaque added in 1891. Dogs are welcome there, there's paid parking in a public car park within 200 metres, and guided visits can be arranged for groups. Between the new Wind in the Willows piece and the older, more weathered walls, Plymouth has quietly built a street art scene that's worth a slow walk around.