On November 11, the Saatchi Gallery in London reopened its doors to spray paint, stolen train carriages, and drum and bass. BEYOND THE STREETS II — the sequel to the record-breaking 2023 show that took over all three floors of the gallery — runs through May 5, 2027, and this time it comes with a twist nobody saw coming: DJ and producer Goldie has been handed his own room for six months, stocked with a working Metalheadz record shop and thirty stacked vintage televisions playing three decades of music videos.
The show that keeps outgrowing its own walls
BEYOND THE STREETS is the ongoing project of Roger Gastman, the graffiti historian and curator who first staged it as a sprawling warehouse show in Los Angeles in 2018, then brought it to New York in 2019. When it landed in London in February 2023, it billed itself as the most comprehensive graffiti and street art exhibition ever staged in the UK, spreading across all three floors of the Saatchi with Adidas Originals as headline sponsor and a 585-page Gastman-edited companion book to go with it. BEYOND THE STREETS II picks up where that show left off, tracing the same throughline — graffiti, punk, hip hop, fashion and film, treated as one continuous culture rather than separate scenes that happened to overlap.
Goldie’s room, and the Metalheadz he built in 1994
The new edition’s most personal addition belongs to Goldie — graffiti writer turned drum and bass pioneer, who co-founded the label Metalheadz in 1994 and has spent three decades as one of the genre’s defining voices. His takeover room functions as a working record shop under the Metalheadz name, paired with a video archive spanning roughly thirty years of short films and music videos, playing simultaneously across thirty stacked vintage television sets. The room also folds in his own graffiti history growing up in the West Midlands, closing the loop between the two cultures the exhibition argues were never actually separate: the kids bombing train lines in the 1980s and the kids building soundsystems were very often the same kids.
A hijacked train carriage, and a 100-year-old patent
One room centers on a full-sized, graffiti-covered train carriage — the Saatchi’s nod to a genuinely overlooked anniversary. The pressurized spray can was patented in 1926 by Norwegian engineer Erik Rotheim, originally conceived for deodorant and household sprays decades before it became graffiti’s primary tool. Exactly a century later, BEYOND THE STREETS II uses the carriage to walk through the object that made train-bombing and tag culture physically possible in the first place, with court summonses and arrest records from New York’s subway-graffiti crackdown of the late 1970s and ’80s displayed alongside it, according to coverage from IanVisits and the exhibition’s own event listings.
Planning a visit
BEYOND THE STREETS II runs at the Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York’s HQ, King’s Road, Chelsea, through May 5, 2027. Standard admission is listed at £25, with concessions at £18 and free entry for children under six; off-peak pricing applies Monday through Thursday. Confirm the current price and any timed-entry slots directly at saatchigallery.com before visiting, since several resale and listings sites quote slightly different figures. The gallery has also scheduled a series of after-hours “Lates” events tied to the show, including dates in late November and December, with separate ticketing from standard daytime entry.
Why it’s worth the trip
Street art retrospectives can easily collapse into nostalgia — framed photographs of walls that no longer exist, behind glass, in a building the original artists could never have afforded to show in. What makes Gastman’s version of this show work twice now is that it keeps handing rooms to people who are still actively working: Goldie isn’t illustrating his own history here, he’s running a functioning record shop inside a gallery. That’s a different proposition than a museum wall text, and it’s the reason BEYOND THE STREETS keeps selling out cities three editions in.
