Fratton Park Street Art

Portsmouth has a vibrant street art scene and there are some great pieces around Fratton Park, home of Portsmouth Football Club.

The pre-match video

Before Pompey matches they play a super-inspiring video on the big screen which (quite rightly) isn’t generally shared with the wider public as it’s a special you’ve-got-to-be-there match experience.

I recorded the video in early 2019 and have shared it a couple of times in a Pompey Facebook group, and am always asked for it to be more widely available. I’ve had to put it on YouTube just to share it but it’s unlisted so only people who find it through this page will be able to watch. Hopefully only genuine fans will read this, and it is a place which people can bookmark and watch again if they need to feel those special goosebumps that the video produces.

Enjoy!

The street art around Fratton Park

I’ve been a Pompey fan since the mid 1970s and over the years various parts of the stadium have been covered in some form of art. Most of the outside perimeter has been painted over, but there are plenty of murals on Specks Lane, at the eastern end of the ground behind the away end.

Just a short distance from Fratton Park is a large mural opposite Tesco Express in Goldsmith Avenue. Local artist My Dog Sighs was approached by Seadog Print Studio to create some art on their wall. He collaborated with Snub 23, whom he’d admired for a while, to create this piece.

It features one of My Dog Sighs’ iconic eyes, depicting an image of Pompey winning the FA Cup in 1939, and is surrounded by Snub’s geometric stencil work.
Snub is prolific in Brighton and you can see more of his work here in my Brighton Graffiti Tour.

You can see more of My Dog Sighs and Snub 23 on Instagram

For my Fratton Park street art tour I’m going to start inside the ground, where in 2012 a project called Spray Up Pompey recruited local artists and students at Portsmouth University to rejuvanate various locations. One of the students was Nigel Sharman, known back then as AceOne Designs, who was in his final year of an illustration course. Nigel was always interested in graffiti and street art, and the Pompey Supporters Trust liked his designs so asked him to work on an area underneath the North Stand.

It was Nigel’s idea to pay tribute to key players from the past thirty years using their shirts hanging on a rail, locker-room style, inspired by the website pompeyshirts.co.uk which charted every Portsmouth shirt design.

Nigel chose key players from the early 1980s to 2012, and also used ideas from the Trust and other workers at the ground to make sure all the fan favourites were represented, as the timeline started way before he was born!

Nigel spent six months creating the mural, and was very much governed by the weather as it wasn’t possible to paint on a wet day, and the winter days were really cold so progress was restricted.

The final mural was lacquered to preserve it and it’s done really well to stand the test of time, still a major feature in the North Stand and admired by thousands of fans at every home game. If you’d like to see more of Nigel’s work then click here to see his website or visit his shop here. You can find him on Instagram here.

You can also find many murals and colourful graffiti by local Portsmouth artists outside the ground in Specks Lane, at the eastern end of Fratton Park.

This is by ArtFormDodger and you can see more on his Instagram account.

Syrup has produced a few pieces of Fratton Park street art, but she is semi-retired now and learning how to tattoo instead. Here is a link to her Instagram account to see more!

There are a few pieces by G-funk.

Here is a gallery of the rest of the street art which was on display when I visited early in 2019.

I hope you enjoyed reading about Fratton Park street art. You can see more stunning art in the posts below :

• Brighton Street Art Tour
• Mission District Street Art in San Francisco
• Shoreditch Street Art
• Best Paste-Up Street Art in Brighton and Shoreditch
• Graffiti Alley in Toronto