📸 Sam Waller
You’d be forgiven for not spotting it, but in the alleyway next to Seen, hiding just above a drainpipe about 10 feet up on the side of a brick wall, there’s a pretty important piece of art. It’s not a big fancy painting, or an ornate sculpture, but instead a small mosaic, made up of around 100 blue and yellow tiles, depicting one of the most enduring icons of the early video game age… the Space Invader.
📸 Seen’s neighbourhood Space Invader, just down the alley from our Police Street shop.
Since 1998 this masked man has been hiding his artworks in the real world—deploying them in cities during covert (and legally dubious) installations he calls ‘Invasions’. His work is now in more than 60 cities across the globe—with well over 1,000 of them in Paris, 132 of them in Hong Kong and 162 in London. There’s two underwater on the shore of Mexico’s Cancun Bay—and one of them took a trip to the International Space Station.
📸 No two Space Invaders are alike.
The Invader originally started the project as a way to bring the video game characters of his youth into the physical world—but once he started working with tiles he quickly realised their hard-wearing nature meant they were the perfect material for street art. Not only do they echo the pixelated shape of 8-bit characters, but they’re super tough—perfect for withstanding the elements and angry attempts at removal.
There’s meaning behind the mosaics too—created as a reaction to the elitism and inaccessibility of art galleries, the Space Invaders are positioned in the public so that everyone can enjoy them. Some of them might have found their way into the hands of money-loving art collectors thanks to a bit of crowbar ingenuity, but that’s not the point. In fact, unlike most artists who balk at plagiarism, Invader welcomes it—suggesting fans of his work should, “Buy tiles and create their own.”
📸 Each mosaic is given a number so it can be found and tagged—this is Man_32.
So, where are the other 46 in Manchester? Good question. More than just a mosaic-maker, The Invader has turned his creations (and the city) into one big scavenger hunt. Think of it like Pokemon GO, for bathroom tiles. Not only is there a complex scoring system and leaderboard for anyone wanting to catch ‘em all, but there’s also maps (although you’re going to need a spare £120 for a copy of the now-out-of-print Manchester edition) and a serious community of spotters tagging them on Instagram and Flickr.
There’s no point in us listing off the locations of them here—after all—finding them for yourself is where the fun lies, but we will say that like Manchester’s very own mosaic mastermind, Mark Kennedy—whose work you’ll know from the side of Affleck’s Palace—Invader hid a decent chunk of his work around the Northern Quarter. There’s also quite a few around Chinatown and Canal Street.
📸 A dedicated group of spotters carry out repairs on the mosaics, which is maybe why some of them still look so fresh.
Wander down the alleyways, head down the side-streets and keep looking up and your curiosity will be rewarded. Hidden in plain sight, positioned just a bit higher than your eyeline, they’re the kind of thing you could walk past everyday on your way to work without ever noticing. But like that strange phenomenon where you learn a new word and then start hearing it relentlessly, once you spot a few Space Invaders out in the wild, they’ll crop up everywhere.
Considering how much has happened in Manchester since Invader’s visit in 2004, it’s remarkable that more than three quarters of his mosaics are still around. In fact, if you look through the photos in the Manchester section of his website you can see that in a way, less has changed around here than you’d maybe first think—and once you strip back the shiny new shopfronts, the hardy red brick buildings and narrow back-streets still look pretty much the same.
📸 The sands of time have made some mosaics harder to spot than others.
The tiles might be a bit more weathered after over two decades of Manchester rain, but they’ve held up surprisingly well. Alright, a tree sprouting from the banks of the Irwell has grown inconveniently right in front of a green mosaic on the side of a Travelodge, and one unlucky Space Invader on the legendary Withy Grove Stores building has been given a stealthy coat of grey paint—but still, the tiles are there if you’re willing to look. 
📸 One of the many mosaics in the Northern Quarter.
Which is maybe the charm of these things. It’s easy to rush around the city with your head down—whether you’re racing to work or just trying to get out of the rain—but the humble Space Invaders offer a different, slower-paced and wide-eyed way to engage with the urban area. Next time you’re in Seen for some new specs, have a little wander down the alleyway to the side and see if you can spot the little yellow Space Invader perched behind that drainpipe. Only a few more to go after that…
Visit Seen Opticians at 11 Police Street, Manchester, or discover the latest additions to our glasses and sunglasses collection below.
