I fell in love with art on a council estate

I did not come to art through the usual route. I was not taken around galleries as a kid. I did not grow up in a house where people talked about painters over dinner. I grew up on a council estate, where art was on walls, shutters and street corners. It was graffiti. It was bold, visible and impossible to ignore. That was the first version of art I connected with, and I connected with it instantly.

Claimed for themselves

Growing up on a council estate, creativity felt less like something preserved behind glass and more like something people claimed for themselves in the open. Graffiti was not explained to me through theory or art history; it hit me in the stomach first, which is why I loved it so much that my stepdad graffitied my name on my bedroom wall, where it stayed for 17 years. Looking back, that wall was probably my first gallery.

Make people feel

Over time, that early connection grew into a deeper interest in street art and then contemporary art more broadly, because art changed the way I understood spaces and showed me how a room could be lifted by one powerful image. It showed me how a building could hold emotion, and how creativity could alter the rhythm of a place. Long before I had the language for it, I understood that art could make people feel something before they understood why.

The social code

Yet the more I entered the art world, the more obvious its barriers became. Even later, while working in Mayfair and engaging with the art world more seriously, I still found many traditional galleries strangely difficult to enter, because the doors were technically open, but the atmosphere often said otherwise. There was a social code in the room, a sense that you were expected to know how to stand, what to say, how long to look and whether you belonged. That is a problem because art is one of the most universal things we have. It speaks before language, crosses class, age and background, and can be funny, provocative, beautiful, uncomfortable or completely baffling without ever needing to make someone feel stupid for being curious. Too often, the art world confuses seriousness with stiffness, and exclusivity with value.

A gallery with life in it

Helm Gallery was created to push against that. I did not want to build another quiet white room where people drift in, speak in whispers and leave feeling as if they have either passed or failed an invisible test. I wanted to build a gallery with life in it, where people could come for a coffee, open a laptop, meet friends, stay for a drink, join a workshop, host an event and experience serious art without feeling they needed permission to enjoy it.

Open, social and human

Being the largest gallery space on the South Coast gives Helm a responsibility beyond scale, because size is only meaningful if it creates room for more people, more conversations and more routes into art. Helm houses works from names such as Banksy, Sir Peter Blake, Damien Hirst, Eric Stefanski and Margo from Margate, but the intention is not to make people feel intimidated by those names. The intention is to place culturally significant work in an environment that feels open, social and human. My own route into art started with graffiti and street culture, so Helm was never going to be built around one narrow idea of taste. A young person should be able to walk in because they recognise Banksy, while someone else might come because they want somewhere beautiful to work for an afternoon. Another person might arrive for an event and unexpectedly find themselves standing in front of a piece that stays with them, and those entry points are not distractions from the art; they are the way people build a relationship with it.

Shared experiences

Art should not belong only to people who were taught how to talk about it. It should belong to anyone who has ever looked at a wall, an image or a space and felt something move. I fell in love with art on a council estate, not in a private view, and that has shaped everything I believe about Helm. The future of galleries should be less about guarded rooms and more about shared experiences. If art can live on my bedroom wall, it can certainly live somewhere more open than the world it has too often been kept inside.

Luke Davis is the co-founder and CEO of Helm Gallery, in the heart of Brighton. He is also the founder of Rockwater