If you’ve checked out my Instagram or read previous blog posts you’d know that I absolutely love street art. I find it such a great way to explore a new city and it has the benefit of normally being a free way to see a new place as well! As a big city, Toronto has plenty of street art to look at. There’s lots of places to see them at but none come close to Graffiti Alley.
Graffiti Alley is located along Rush Lane between Portland Street and Spadina Avenue. It runs parallel to Richmond Street West and Queen Street West so navigating to either of those streets would be the easiest way to locate it. I’d give yourself at least 1 or 2 hours to properly explore this place. Make sure you’ve charged your camera(s) ahead of time and you’re wearing comfortable shoes.
One of the larger scale, and more permanent, pieces seems to be the aquarium one that you can see below. It runs from top to bottom on two sides of the building and has some incredibly detailed and colourful work.
This particular wall even comes with handy little frames to let you pose inside of them! Fair warning, as a short person it definitely took me a couple of tries to get up!
I’m not particularly knowledgeable on who most of the artists who work in graffiti alley but one of the more known ones is Poser
who is responsible for the lovely bunny art you can see in a couple of different places in the Alley.
As a bit of an insider tip, I would not recommend wearing flipflops when visiting Graffiti Alley. This is despite me having done so all the times I’ve gone there haha. While it’s a lovely place and completely worth a visit, it is still an alley. As such there are random water puddles and some garbage that’s hard to always avoid and your main focus should be the art and not looking down to see where you’re stepping. I could obviously go on and on about why this place is great but why don’t I let you take a look for yourself:
It might be my love for McDonald’s but I’m a sucker for this piece. It’s one of my favourites!
I always do a double take at this one. Definitely creepier than it needs to be!
Should you be interested in the entire lyric of this song that can be found here.
The key to a successful visit to Graffiti Alley is to look everywhere. And I really do mean everywhere.
Am I the only one that gets a kick out of seeing childhood memories semi-immortalized like this?
To check out more pictures of Graffiti Alley I’d highly recommend checking out this Instagram account from your phone.
Have you visited Graffiti Alley? What were your thoughts? Does your city have a similar place? If so, let me know in the comments!
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The colours!
There looks to be some great art here. I have done a few graffiti tours while travelling and they have always been really interesting. I did not know about this place when I visited Toronto but will have to try and visit next time I am there.
I love discovering street art when traveling, these look amazing and reminds me of Melbourne and Bogota where there are streets and alleys covered in street art. It’s great now cities and towns are recognizing street art as art now 😀 – Will definitely have to check this out when I finally get to Toronto
What beautiful pictures! I can only imagine how pretty this would have been in person. Loved every piece of art on this post, thanks for sharing.
Beautiful graffiti! I’ve not really gone to places specifically to check the street art out but whenever I’ve come across it, there’s been this amazing quality about a lot of it, these artists are amazing ! Your pictures are lovely, the art is so colourful and picture-friendly. Love it!
Wow, what utterly stunning graffiti art! I get the feeling you may have walked in some puddles with your flip flops but it was totally worth it to share these images with us!
Street art is the only type of art I like to look at while I’m travelling. Toronto has such a vibrant culture and it looks like the street art scene reflects that. Thanks for sharing!
I love street art – anyone who reads my blog will tell you that! So this looks like the perfect place for me – I’d definitely hang out here a while x
I love that there is gorgeous grafitti in every city. I already love Toronto, it just gives me another excuse to go back and shoot some great photography of the art!
I always love seeing street art wherever I travel! I especially love those fish with glasses.
These are so cool! I think my favorite would be the alien one near the Capra properties
Omg this is incredible!!! We were just in Toronto but missed this! How did we miss this? A reason to go back for sure!
Fantastic photos! I was just in Toronto at the end of May, and I explored Graffiti Alley a bit. It’s cool that the city had artists paint the alley. The mural of the underwater world was cool. First of all, it’s a massive undertaking to have wrapped it all around that building. Plus, it had so many fun details like the fish playing poker. Definitely an Instagramable spot in Toronto!
I used to travel to Toronto frequently for business. How did I miss this??? Now I need to go back because I LOVE street art too.
This is really interesting! I never really have taken the time to look at street art while traveling. But thanks to your blog I will take more notice. Thank you for sharing!
Can’t get enough of those colourful street art! I love all your pictures here. Specially the fun fish theme and the mummy! hahaha. I’ve been only to Vancouver in Canada and I’d love to visit Toronto one day. I’ve added the Graffiti Alley on my bucket list! 😀
Beautiful stuff. I’m especially diggin the photos with horses and barrels.