Underpasses That Became Secret Art Worlds (12 Photos)

Underpasses are usually the parts of a city people hurry through.

Here are 12 tunnels, bridges, and forgotten walkways that become fox dens, eagle caves, rainbow reading rooms, alien portals, and hidden galleries under the city.

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📸 Hands / Photo Tunnel — By Kerry Wilson in Glenrothes, Scotland 🇬🇧

Kerry Wilson turns the whole underpass into a giant phone-screen moment. Art UK lists the 2017 work as “Hands” at Napier Road, at the entrance to an underpass behind Glenwood in Glenrothes, while a Two Scots Abroad feature describes it locally as the “Macedonia Mobile” or “Maci Selfie,” created through the Golden Glenrothes Charrette events. The road becomes the subject, the bridge becomes the screen, and the painted hands make it feel like the city has been caught mid-photo.

💡 Nerd Fact: Glenrothes has long treated public art as part of civic life: Fife Art Trail says the new town appointed a “Town Artist” in 1968, and Welcome to Fife counts 172 works on the Town Art Trail. So this phone-screen tunnel sits inside one of Scotland’s most distinctive public-art traditions, rather than feeling like a random one-off.

More: Photo Tunnel by Kerry Wilson in Glenrothes, UK

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🦅 “Flying Eagle” — By SPAIK in Ibiza, Spain 🇪🇸

SPAIK uses the curved concrete as if it were made for this bird all along. Brooklyn Street Art documents the tunnel piece as “Flying Eagle,” painted for BLOOP Festival in Ibiza in July 2016, connected to that year’s “No Fear” theme. The wings stretch across the ceiling, the body sits in the shadow, and suddenly the underpass feels less like infrastructure and more like a flight path.

💡 Nerd Fact: This eagle also has a tunnel sequel: GraffitiStreet notes that SPAIK returned the following year for BLOOP’s “Changes” theme with a snake, chosen partly because snakes had arrived on Ibiza through imported olive trees and become a local pest. That makes the eagle feel like part one of a tiny island food-chain story.

More: Made You Dream on Street Art Utopia

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🦊 “Longbridge Foxes” — By Annatomix in Longbridge, Birmingham, UK 🇬🇧

Annatomix makes the wall feel like a faceted fox has stepped out of the landscape. Street Art Cities lists the set as “Longbridge Foxes,” painted in 2023 for the River Rea nature trail at River Rea Trail, Rubery Lane. On her own site, Annatomix notes that her animal forms are less about literal origami and more about geometry, low-poly modelling, crystalline structures, and architecture. Here those sharp orange planes turn a grey underpass into a small urban woodland.

💡 Nerd Fact: The foxes are placed beside a river many Birmingham residents barely see: Rea Valley Conservation Group says the River Rea rises in the Waseley Hills and joins the River Tame near Spaghetti Junction, while Geograph notes that much of the river through the city centre is culverted and not easily visible. The mural makes a half-hidden Birmingham waterway feel like a place worth noticing.

More: Origami Fox by Annatomix in Longbridge, Birmingham

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👽 Close Encounter — By Nego in Salamanca, Spain 🇪🇸

Nego turns a rough tunnel wall into a sharp little sci-fi scene. The alien reaches forward from the graffiti-covered surface as if it has just noticed you walking by. It is funny, weird, and just unsettling enough to make the underpass feel like a portal.

💡 Nerd Fact: Nego’s aliens have a graphic-design backbone: Street Art Cities describes Jorge Nego as a self-taught graffiti artist active since 2000, with training in editorial design, graphic design, and fine arts in Salamanca. That poster-clean readability is not accidental; it comes from someone who understands both graffiti energy and printed-page discipline.

More: #2 Made You Love Art (10 Photos)

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💙 “GLITCH-1” — By Theora in Corsica, France 🇫🇷

Hidden under a bridge, Theora’s blue mural feels more like a dream than a shortcut. The artist’s Instagram post presents the piece as “GLITCH-1”, a fitting title for the way the two girls, flowers, and butterfly seem to hover between calm realism and digital interruption. It creates a quiet little world in a place many people would normally pass without looking twice.

💡 Nerd Fact: The title “GLITCH-1” taps into a whole digital-art idea: Tate describes glitch art as making art out of errors. So the bridge becomes more than shelter; it feels like a place where the city’s normal signal briefly breaks into poetry.

More: “GLITCH” by Theora in Corsica, France

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📚 “Unreadacted” — By Amanda Newman in Melbourne, Australia 🇦🇺

At first glance, this overpass mural is simply tender: two children absorbed in a book against a rainbow glow. But Amanda Newman’s own Street Art page titles the work “Unreadacted” and explains that it responds to the Mahmoud v. Taylor U.S. Supreme Court ruling, its mention of “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” and wider book bans and censorship. The warmth remains, but the mural’s point becomes sharper: children reading freely should feel ordinary, not controversial.

💡 Nerd Fact: The legal fight was about opt-outs, not simply one book disappearing from a shelf: Oyez summarizes Mahmoud v. Taylor as a case about whether public schools burden religious exercise when they require elementary-school children to participate in instruction that conflicts with parents’ religious beliefs. That context makes the title “Unreadacted” feel like a call to keep stories visible instead of blacked out.

More: Street Art You Can’t Ignore When You Walk By

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🧢 Out of the Tunnel — By Cosimo CHEONE Caiffa in Nerviano, Italy 🇮🇹

Documented by Barbara Picci as “Out of the tunnel” in Nerviano, CHEONE’s underpass piece makes the tunnel feel like it has grown a character of its own. The figure seems to arrive from the same ordinary route as the viewer, turning a plain wall into a small story about movement, mischief, and everyday commuters suddenly sharing space with a painted stranger.

💡 Nerd Fact: Nerviano seems to be one of CHEONE’s repeat canvases rather than a single stop: Barbara Picci’s Nerviano archive lists several CHEONE works in the town across different years. That makes this underpass part of a local street-art mini-map, not just an isolated viral photo.

More: More by CHEONE

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🫂 Embrace Under the Bridge — By Sasha Korban in Kyiv, Ukraine 🇺🇦

Sasha Korban turns a cold concrete bridge wall into a deeply human moment. Five people fold into one quiet embrace, and the whole space seems to soften around them. It is the kind of mural that makes an underpass feel less like a passage and more like a pause.

💡 Nerd Fact: Korban’s background makes this bridge-wall tenderness hit harder: Sky Art Foundation says he was born in the Donetsk region and worked as a miner from 2006 to 2011 before making street art his conscious practice. A former underground worker painting care under a bridge adds an extra layer.

More: Embracing Reality and Fantasy

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🌈 “AI Generator” — By Uplne Mimo

Uplne Mimo treats the underside of a bridge like a machine that exploded into color. The exact location is not listed in the Street Art Utopia archive post, but the setting does the work: concrete disappears under a rush of shapes, motion, and bright fragments, making the whole space feel like a hidden generator for street-art energy.

💡 Nerd Fact: The artist name itself is a little Czech-language curveball: Uplne Mimo’s Behance profile lists him as an artist from the Czech Republic working across graffiti, street art, painting, digital graphics, and illustration, and the sentence “Jsi úplně mimo” translates as “You must be out of your mind”. For a mural called “AI Generator,” that makes the name feel like a wink at being creatively off the rails.

More: AI Generator Mural by Uplne Mimo

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🐱 “Peeking cat” — By Andy Dice Davies in Cheltenham, UK 🇬🇧

Andy Dice Davies makes the bridge opening feel like a secret animal hideout. Street Art Cities lists the work as “Peeking cat” by Dice 67, aka Andy Dice Davies, at 279 Cirencester Road, Charlton Kings, near Little Herbert’s Nature Reserve. The cat’s wide eyes and reaching paw pull the viewer into the archway, as if the path suddenly belongs to this curious giant.

💡 Nerd Fact: This kind of friendly street surprise fits Dice’s whole public-art philosophy: Dice’s own artist page says much of his street work is personal and that he likes it to be positive and colourful, while his homepage identifies him as founder and director of Cheltenham Paint Festival. The cat is not just a crowd-pleaser; it comes from a local artist who helped build the town’s street-art scene.

More: Never Avoid What Makes You Smile

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🎨 Leake Street Graffiti Tunnel — In London, UK 🇬🇧

Leake Street is not just one artwork. It is a living tunnel-gallery under Waterloo station: Leake Street Arches describes the site as former railway arches beneath Waterloo, adjoining London’s longest legal graffiti wall, and Visit London calls it the capital’s longest graffiti gallery. Every walk through Leake Street feels like catching London’s street-art conversation in the middle of a sentence.

💡 Nerd Fact: Leake Street’s legal-graffiti status traces back to Banksy’s “Cans Festival”: Leake Street Arches says Banksy invited artists from around the world to paint the tunnel, with the rule that they did not cover other works. The name was a pun on Cannes, but the result became a real open-air archive that keeps being overwritten.

More: Leake Street graffiti tunnel

📷 Photo by Tunde Valiszka on X

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🍃 “L’oiseau et le Renard” — By Alegria del Prado in Joinville-le-Pont, France 🇫🇷

Street-Heart documents this Le Spot mural as “L’oiseau et le Renard” at 126 quai de Polangis in Joinville-le-Pont. Notorious Brand says the wider Le Spot project transformed the area under the A4 bridge with international artists around art, nature, and sport. Alegria del Prado’s fox-like creature, leaves, and birds spread across the concrete like nature found a secret way to grow through the city.

💡 Nerd Fact: Alegria del Prado is not one person: Art Valais identifies the duo as Octavio Macías Alegría from Guadalajara and Ester González del Prado from Burgos, working together since 2011. And at Le Spot, the mural sits inside a larger urban-renaturing project where Joinville-le-Pont says 33,000 new plants were planned across 11,000 m² on the A4 motorway leftovers. The fox is part of a designed ecosystem, not just decoration.

More: I Just Found These Incredible Murals

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Which one is your favorite?