Sat in Shoreditch House I was waiting for Tracey Moberly to turn up, Author of Text-Me-Up! and co-owner of The Foundry, Artist and Activist.

I am a sucker for romance, and that, combined with my ever-willingness to take part in a good art project (that doesn't require too much of my limited artistic talent), made me a perfect candidate to add my padlock to the budding Shoreditch love lock fence.

BMW's Art Cars programme has been running for almost 40 years now. Every now and then the Bavarian manufacturer hands a pristine, straight-off-the-production-line, car to an artist of note and tells them to use it as their canvas.

It seems like we're losing a lot of our heroes of late. From giants of contemporary music like Donna Summer, and MCA, to the inventor of the Raleigh Chopper bicycle - Alan Oakley.

In a borough as diverse as Hackney, you will never capture the area in its entirety, and this was never our intention. What the books is, is our version of our neighbourhood. What made it so special to create, was that we found we weren't the only people striving to mark what is going on here, and we certainly aren't the only ones interested in it.

A student from Mitcham is an unlikely source of inspiration for a world-renowned street artist but James Cochran - who has painted in London, Paris and New York - was so impressed by Javon Davies, a pupil from Richmond College he painted a mural of him in the East End.

Shoreditch, essentially, is the ideal setting for SPECTRA I: the first in a three part survey, as it has been coined, of dynamic colour use in contemporary art. Presented by The Future Tense - which acts as a springboard for emerging artists and specialises in the pop-up art gallery phenomena.