‘I don’t like being bullied,’ Russell Gray told me indignantly, beneath an enormous wooden bust of a Hindu deity. The divine sculpture’s attention was mostly directed towards his desk opposite. But it watched over us from one side, as we perched in the kitchen alcove of the Dragons Den-style warehouse from which he conducted his business.
We were in The Tanneries. Once a key cog in Bermondsey’s hide processing trade, the property developer and self-styled anarchist has transformed the site into a sprawling complex of office buildings, art spaces and a yoga studio. ‘Beautiful setting and perfect for yoga and meditation,’ says one reviewer on Google. ‘Shame the owner is not as zen.’
I was not at The Tanneries for flow yoga. I was there about the sharks. Russell, who is in his late 60s, with cropped yellow-white hair, has spent much of the last five years fighting to return five giant fibreglass sharks to Regent’s Canal. The art installation – named Sharks! – was first due to grace the waters outside Hoxton Docks in August 2020. But Hackney Council got wind of Russell’s plans and came down hard. They launched multiple High Court injunctions against the installation, ordering its removal, and as the owner of the artwork and of Hoxton Docks, it was down to Russell to defend it. Hackney Council argued that the sharks were a danger to the community; that Russell’s attempts to antagonise them had gone on long enough. But it was all in vain.
At times over recent years, only one shark had appeared in the water by Haggerston Bridge, sometimes none at all. But now the full cohort has their rightful place in the canal, leaping defiantly out of the water atop metal NATO pontoons.
Shiva is the Hindu god of destruction, capable of razing entire universes to ash to fulfil the natural cosmic cycle of regeneration. He’s a good guy, basically, immensely powerful and wise but prone to bouts of rage. He is also, as it happens, the name of Russell’s property restoration company, Shiva Limited.
Shiva was founded in 1989, after inheritance money allowed Russell to move into the commercial property market. Bermondsey was being abandoned by the factories and industries that had occupied it for decades. Prices were cheap, and so Russell was able to pick up the ex-tannery buildings for less than £500,000. As the value of the land shot up, he fortified his portfolio, acquiring other buildings and land around the area. As an avid military hardware enthusiast, he began collecting combat vehicles.
When Southwark Council refused his application to build along Mandela Way in the mid-90s, he knew just what to do. He placed a Soviet T-34 tank on the plot instead, and pointed the turret directly at the council offices.
He named the tank Stompie, after Stompie Seipei: a teenage activist murdered by Winnie Mandela’s security detail in 1989. As Stompie became a local icon, the council stopped trying to remove it. This provided a valuable lesson. ‘They always give up’ he said. ‘They make fools of themselves for long enough, and then they just sort of throw in the towel.’
