All good in the Wood – Star Platforms at Wood Street Walls

Wood St Walls, the community organisation who help create beautiful and accessible public art, has unveiled the latest video of a Star Platforms scissor lift being put to good use on a mural.

‘All Good in the Wood’ is a mural by Ronzo in Wood Street. E17, Walthamstow, East London.

Skyjack and Star Platforms helped Wood Street Walls for a 10-day event titled Paint Your London, an art exhibit that is part of the larger Find Your London Festival, which took place from March 18 through 28 and encouraged Londoners and tourists to embrace outdoor spaces throughout the city. Wood Street Walls is a London-based non-profit whose mission is to bring public art to East London, provide free workshops to the public to grow new creative talent and establish a creative hub for local artists.

This was the first Find Your London festival, celebrating the more than £400 million in updates and additions to parks and green spaces throughout London since 2009. The investment and Find Your London festival is part of a wider plan to help establish London as the world’s most livable and greenest city. Wood Street Walls erected 12 murals across Waltham Forest to help the area come to life through the installation of street art.

“The goal of this free art exhibition was to highlight green areas within the city and encourage visitors to explore London’s outdoor areas,” said Milli Richards, marketing and communications manager at Wood Street Walls. “Painting 12 murals in this time frame was no easy feat; but was helped enormously with assistance of Skyjack and Star Platforms.”
Wood Street Walls previously used Skyjack lifts when working on murals with artists Irony & Boe and Mark McClure. McClure is a local artist who creates his art from recycled and upcycled wood. Unique to the ‘street art’ scene, McClure attaches his wood designs to building instead of painting the art. McClure’s work was featured at the London Olympics’ ‘Living Walls’ project that brought public art to the Olympic Park.

Local, national and international street artists helped create the 12 murals at the festival. The use of the Skyjack lift was critical in helping complete all of the projects during the Paint Your London event. The scissor lift allowed the artists to save time on the upper portions of the murals, having the ability to continuously paint without constantly going up and down a ladder. Using a Skyjack scissor lift was also a safer alternative than ladders for painting at height, allowing the artists to focus solely on their work.

“It has been really useful having the Skyjack machines from Star in the past. They save a lot of time on the murals, and all of the operators appreciate that the machines are so easy to use,” said Richards. “It was wonderful to have a Skyjack again at the Paint Your London event.”

The Skyjack SJ6832 RT from Star Platforms is a rough terrain scissor lift, proved ideal to manoeuvre around the outdoor areas up to an 11.75m working height. The platform is driveable at full height, so the artists could continuously paint the highest areas of the mural. The lift has a 1.52 m extension deck, 454 kg capacity and up to four people can be in the platform at the same time, allowing the artists to keep all of their paint and tools on the lift when needed. As with all Skyjack lifts, the SJ6832 RT and RTE (electric version) is operator-friendly, has SKYCODED™ colour-coded wiring and can also be outfitted with Skyjack’s ACCESSORYZERS™ also available from Star Platforms.

“Wood Street Wells gives back to its community through art and Skyjack was honoured to help them do so at the Paint Your London event,” said Malcolm Early, vice president of marketing at Skyjack. “I couldn’t think of a more colourful or exciting way to end our 30 FOR 30 PARTNERS campaign.”

Here’s the electric version of the Star Platforms rough terrain Skyjack scissor in use earlier this year by the Wood Street Walls team. Their work extends all year round, not simply the recent events at Paint Your London.