HELCH
We are broken hearted to share that Helch has passed away.
He stepped into our lives out of the ether. It started with a moment outside the American Carwash in Shoreditch, standing in front of a triumph of roller graffiti that had become an East London landmark, needing to know more about the word and the person behind it.
It took six months to get him to agree to meet. In 2022 we released his first print together and it sold out within the hour. Three years later, in December 2025, No Half Measures opened on Kingsland Road: his first and only solo exhibition, and the first time his original work had been shown anywhere.
Helch was a stranger to the gallery world and a true creature of the night. The gallery walls were not always what it was about for him, and we often had to recalibrate what working together meant. Over the past year his work moved forward faster than anything we had seen. He was a perfectionist who would not put anything in front of people unless it met his own standard, and it was an honour to watch.
An urban landscape without an H in it seems unfathomable. There will never be another like him.
Rest well H. Your rollers have spoken their truth.
Greg, Lara, Axel and the BSMT family
HELCH was a London graffiti writer whose large-scale roller lettering became one of the most recognised words across the city's infrastructure.
From 2018 the tag appeared on railway viaducts, motorway bridges, rooftops and train lines: block capitals, unapologetic, impossible to ignore. The name spread through West and East London, taking in Shoreditch, Paddington, South Kensington and beyond.
In 2019 a twenty metre piece on a railway viaduct near Windsor Castle reportedly upset the late Queen. For years the name kept appearing and the person behind it remained elusive.
The work carries a particular tension, and it still does. To the outside world the dropped H's read as decorative typography. To anyone who knows the streets they are something else entirely: a graffiti writer's name rolled in plain sight, hiding nothing and everything at once.
In December 2025 HELCH stepped out of that shadow. No Half Measures at BSMT Gallery, Dalston was his first and only solo exhibition, and the first time his original work had been shown to the public. The show brought the dropped H's from the bridges and bypasses of London into the gallery space on Kingsland Road. Same word. Same directness. Different room.