How to choose urban wall art

Key answer

Urban wall art is closer-in city texture than a wide skyline. Use this guide to choose grit versus structure, then browse the Urban collection to buy.

AT A GLANCE — Urban
79 works · 22 artists · 6 sizes · from £52.50
Most represented	Assaf Frank, 46 works
Shape of the collection	landscape 38 · portrait 4 · square 9
Best-suited wall	Wide. Above a sofa, sideboard or bed.

Urban is the street, not the skyline

Half this collection is also in cityscape, so the honest framing is that these are two cuts of one body of work rather than two subjects. Cityscape is the city seen from outside or above. Urban is the city at the height of a person standing in it.

The practical difference is scale. Urban pictures have a single readable subject — a shopfront, a doorway, a figure crossing — and a single subject reads at a small size. These are the works for the walls that defeat a landscape: a narrow hallway, a landing, the space beside a door, a downstairs cloakroom.

Black and white does most of the work here

Roughly a quarter of this collection is monochrome, which is a far higher proportion than anywhere else on the site, and it is not a coincidence. A street is visually chaotic — signage, parked cars, six different colours of brick — and removing the colour removes most of that noise at once, leaving the geometry and the figure.

It also makes urban work the easiest genre to hang in a room you have already decorated. A monochrome picture has no palette to clash with, and it looks the same under a January lamp as it does in June, which is not true of anything in colour.

If you want one piece for a hallway and you are not sure what will still be right in five years, this is the collection to look in.

The works to look at

The Nags Head London Pub is part of a set of five Assaf Frank shopfronts — also The Cross Keys London Pub, The Prince Regent London Pub, Crown & Anchor London Pub and Sherlock Holmes London Pub. Warm sepia, gilded lettering, etched glass, a lamplit interior behind. They are the strongest series in the collection and the clearest case for buying more than one: five variations on one idea, and a row of three along a hallway does something none of them does alone.

2 Cyclist 2 Pedestrians by Gerald Bloch looks down on a Parisian boulevard at night, an amber-lit street cutting between blue-roofed Haussmann buildings with two small figures in it. The title tells you what to look for, and once you have found them the scale of the building does the rest.

3 6 1 by Mustafa Tarik OLMEZ is the flattest and most graphic picture here — a sunlit ochre façade, six windows, blue shutters, a pair of jeans on a line. No depth at all, which makes it behave like an abstract and hang like one.

Westminster Illumination by Assaf Frank is the quietest: the Houses of Parliament low in a wide night frame under a full moon, the whole scene mirrored in near-black water. It is the piece for a sitting room where the pub fronts would be too warm and the street scenes too busy.

Buying for a corridor

Urban work ends up in hallways more often than any other genre, so it is worth saying how to do it properly. A corridor is seen in motion and from an angle, never square on and never for long, which means a single picture halfway along gets glanced at and forgotten.

A run of three or more, evenly spaced in identical frames, works completely differently. You meet them one at a time at walking pace, and the repetition is what makes the wall read as deliberate. The pub fronts are built for exactly this. So is any group where the works share a palette — the monochrome pieces will hang together regardless of subject, which is the other argument for choosing black and white in a hallway.

Hang the centre line at about 145 cm and keep the gaps consistent at 5–8 cm. In a corridor the consistency matters more than the height.

One photographer, half the collection

Assaf Frank accounts for roughly half the urban works here, the same as in cityscape.

Practically, that is useful if you want a run of pictures that sit together — a corridor, an office, a stairwell — because one photographer gives you an evenness a mixed edit cannot. If that approach is not for you, eighty works will still read as one voice, and the photography or b&w collections will serve you better.

Where urban work belongs

Landscape format outnumbers portrait here by seven to one, so it is wide-wall work — but the tagging tells a more interesting story. Most works are tagged for a sitting room, around two thirds for a study, and a substantial group for a hallway.

The hallway group is the one worth noticing. Urban work is dense and detailed, and a hallway is the one place in the house where you pass at arm's length and can actually read it. Detail that would be wasted above a sofa earns its place in a corridor.

Choosing

Urban work divides on whether people are in it.

Work with figures has narrative — you read it, you wonder about them, it holds attention. Work without figures is architecture at street level and behaves more like pattern. The first suits a hallway or a room where you want something to look at; the second suits a study, where narrative becomes a distraction over eight hours.

Related genres

Browse the Urban collection →

Quick answers for collectors

What is urban art?

The city seen from street level: what it looks like from inside it, with people, weather, light and incident. It differs from cityscape, which is the city at a distance, and from architectural work, which is the building itself. The distinguishing feature is point of view.

Why is so much urban art black and white?

Street photography is a documentary form and has always leaned monochrome, because removing colour strips out the incidental and leaves gesture, light and composition. Roughly a quarter of this collection is black and white. For colour, the cityscape and London collections carry considerably more.

Which room suits urban prints?

Sitting rooms and studies mostly, but the hallway group is worth noticing. Urban work is dense and detailed, and a hallway is the one place you pass at arm's length and can actually read it. Detail wasted above a sofa earns its place in a corridor.

Should I choose urban work with people in it?

It depends on the room. Work with figures has narrative — you read it and it holds attention, which suits a hallway or a living room. Work without figures behaves more like pattern, which suits a study where narrative becomes a distraction over a working day.

Who is the main urban artist?

Assaf Frank accounts for roughly half the collection, the same as in cityscape. That is useful if you want several pieces that hang together with a consistent eye, and limiting if his approach is not for you — in which case the photography and black and white collections are broader.

What is the difference between urban and cityscape art?

Urban is street level and cityscape is the city at a distance. Just over half our urban works are also tagged cityscape, so the overlap is real, but the urban edit is chosen for point of view: you are inside the city rather than looking at its outline.