George Town Street Art

Two projects made George Town's walls into an attraction. The first, in 2009, was Marking George Town, a set of fifty-two wrought-iron caricature signs fixed to walls across the old town, each drawn as a cartoon telling the story of the street it stands on - why Cannon Street is called that, what happened on Love Lane. The second, in 2012, was a commission for the George Town Festival in which the Lithuanian artist Ernest Zacharevic painted a series of murals combining paint with real objects, most famously two children on a real bicycle on Armenian Street, and those images went round the world. What followed was a wave of further murals by other artists, some commissioned, some not. The originals have faded and been retouched, and some are gone.

What you actually see

• The Zacharevic murals - paint combined with real bicycles, motorbikes and swings.
• Fifty-two iron caricatures - wrought-iron cartoons explaining each street's name.
• Later murals - the wave of work that followed across the old town.
• A walking hunt - the whole thing spread through the heritage core.

When to go

All year; early morning before crowds and heat. Half a day.

Honest expectations

The famous murals have queues for photographs from mid-morning. Weather has faded several and some have been painted over or lost. Maps sold on the street vary in accuracy.

Nearby

The clan jetties, Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion and the Street of Harmony are all walkable.