Banksy (10 page)

Four months after this plan was approved by the council, the piece was splattered in red paint by someone wielding a paintball gun. An outfit calling itself Appropriate Media announced on its
website that they were the perpetrators. Calling the work an urban ‘masterpiss’ by ‘urban masterpisser, Banksy’, they declared: ‘Come on, you only care about it cos
it’s a Banksy and he sells his lazy polemics to Hollywood movie stars for big bucks. Come on, you only care about it cos it makes you feel edgy and urban to tour round the inner city in your
4 x 4, taking in the tired coffee table subversion that graffiti has become. Graffiti artists are the copywriters for the capitalist created phenomenon of urban art. Graffiti artists are the
performing spray-can monkeys for gentrification.’

In response, one resident of the area who was interviewed by BBC Bristol amplified the confusion: ‘I’m shocked. I know that in some graffiti circles he [Banksy] is not actually seen
in the best light. But to do something like that is extremely disrespectful. You wouldn’t do that anywhere, it’s against the rules.’ So somehow Banksy had become almost part of
the establishment and others were the vandals breaking the rules.

But he was not going to hang around to debate all this. Within a few months he was on his way to London. Not only Bristol but the world of ‘pure’ graffiti was being left behind in
favour of a style which did not need to be decoded and was instantly understood and enjoyed, and where Banksy could make his own rules or lack
of rules. In 2010 he told
Time Out
: ‘Traditional graffiti artists have a bunch of rules they like to stick to, and good luck to them, but I didn’t become a graffiti artist so I could have somebody else
tell me what to do.’

As for
The Mild Mild West
, when I last saw it the splatters of paint had been cleaned off by enthusiastic volunteers. The property market had not recovered enough for the flats to be
built there. So, rather than being protected by the proposed glass-enclosed terrace, it still sits on the wall protected by one CCTV camera – the very security cameras which Banksy says today
are ‘one of the worst things about modern Britain’.

Five

All Aboard for the Banksy Tour

S
ome people go on a Jack the Ripper tour; I went on a Banksy tour. The day the contract arrived for this book I decided the first thing I needed was
a total immersion tour around the streets of London where Banksy often paints, which are – conveniently – the streets where I live. Banksy must be the only living artist – and
there cannot be many dead ones either – for whom you can buy a tour book giving you all the spots to find his work. The only problem is that despite regular updating, the book is always going
to be out of date. You arrive and the wall is bare, painted over by council anti-graffiti teams, scrawled over by rival graffiti artists, or simply acquired by speculators.

The book you need is
Banksy Locations & Tours
, self-published by ‘photographer, writer and street walker’ Martin Bull, with a very significant proportion of the profits
– almost £30,000 at the last count – going to the Big Issue Foundation. There is now a bulkier updated edition which covers the whole of Britain, not just London. Ten years ago
Banksy said he wanted to paint every wall in the Easton district of Bristol: ‘Next year they’ll be selling little maps of it with little red dots where my paintings are. That’s
all I
want.’ It took rather more than a year, but here in this new edition are the very red circles he dreamed of, dotted not only around Easton but also all over
Bristol.

With the lighter first edition in one hand, and a page of the London
A to Z
in the other, I was on my way. The first thing I discovered is that you can walk around London with your eyes
wide open, yet tight shut. Quite apart from all the rubbish inflicted on us by kids with a spray can and an up-yours desire to leave their mark, there is a lot of very good graffiti staring you in
the face if only you bother to look – and it isn’t all by Banksy.

I had something of a head start. Months earlier, walking along the Essex Road in Islington, I had been stopped dead by a Banksy on the side of a chemist’s shop – three children
pledging their allegiance to a Tesco flag that had been run up on an electricity cable which Banksy had very cleverly transformed into a flagpole. As I stood there looking a man passed me by and
said: ‘A load of over-rated rubbish,’ but he just kept walking as though he had not said a word and gave me no chance to tell him how wrong I thought he was. I learned later that the
canvas version was called
Very Little Helps
and in 2010 was sold at Sotheby’s by former supermodel Jerry Hall for £82,850. Towards the end of 2011 I passed the chemist’s
shop again; someone had taken the time and trouble to remove the top layer of Perspex protection and obliterate Banksy’s painting with silver spray paint. I stood there mournfully with two
other passers-by. Even though I had been told time and again how impermanent street art is supposed to be, it still seemed an utterly pathetic, destructive thing to do.

On my tour the first graffiti I came across had nothing to do with Banksy. It was huge, painted on a wall the length of a cricket pitch in an abandoned depot formerly used by Initial Washroom
Solutions. The depot must have been waiting to be turned into a block of flats but in the meantime it had become a playground for graffiti artists. There was the usual city
rubbish, flattened water bottles, bike locks (where’s the bike?), McDonald’s bags, beer cans and a couple of buddleia, the one plant that thrives where everything else has long since
given up the ghost. There was ample wall space to play with but there were locked gates to keep out all but the very determined – or those who, I was to discover much later, had negotiated a
way in with the property developers.

The wall running along the side of a disused loading platform had been painted in a series of huge, curving zebra stripes. Pasted up in the middle of all these stripes was a page from the
A
to Z
, enlarged to a giant size, perfect in the detail and name of every street, except for the fact that it was the wrong shape for a page out of the
A to Z
. But by standing back a bit
the whole thing came into focus; it was anything but haphazard. The page was shaped – perfectly – like a revolver and running through the middle was the Lower Clapton Road. On the
platform below was scrawled in crude letters: ‘Murder Mile’. Googling Lower Clapton Road I came across an article in the
Independent
from January 2002: ‘Eight men shot dead
in two years. Welcome to Britain’s Murder Mile.’

On one side of this piece was the signature ‘Pure Evil’, written at a size that would eat up all but the very biggest canvas. Google delivered once more, telling me that Pure Evil
was a graffiti artist with his own gallery. The gallery blurb said he left England for California after the poll tax riots and spent ten years there ‘ingesting weapons grade
psychedelics’ before returning to London to pick up a spray can. Just this one piece had given me a very good lesson on how graffiti can jump from the wall to the web to the gallery. The next
morning I sent him an email:

From
Murder Mile
I started sniffing around with a new enthusiasm and within an hour or so I had spotted four good pieces of art within spraying distance of each other – and still I
hadn’t found the Banksy. There was a ‘paste up’ of a woman wearing an elaborately patterned jacket which revealed a crudely stitched-up wound across her neck. Over her head was a
sack as if she was awaiting her execution, except the sack was as elaborately patterned as the jacket. It was intricate and arresting, even though people had started to tear bits off the poster in
passing.

I admit that until I started this book I had no idea what a ‘paste up’ was. Happily a young graffiti artist took pity on me: a paste up is a piece of work, usually in poster form,
that you prepare beforehand and then, usually using wheatpaste, you stick up on a wall – simple.

Next to this woman seemingly waiting for her execution there was a black and white Pierrot figure which could have been a Banksy for all I knew, but it wasn’t in the guide book. A street
or so away someone had darkened the modern brick on the side of an office to provide the shadow that outlined a man’s face. Clever, and very unclear how they did it, for the wall was so vast
– did no one stop them or at least ask what they were doing? The only trouble was that someone else had got to it; there were white
splodges roller-painted on to the
wall and the whole thing had become a complete eyesore.

But where was Banksy? It turned out I had not been following the map correctly – I had the right canal, but the wrong bridge. Once at the right bridge it was easy enough. There was a
hoodie under the bridge – almost life size – eating from a carry-out bag of chips, and because he was devouring them on the wrong side of the canal, the side without a towpath, no one
had been able to reach him. Banksy must have had a boat when he painted it. On the bridge there were plenty of tags reminding me just how destructive graffiti can be, yet here was Banksy’s
hoodie still in his original state, peacefully noshing away. No council workers, no British Waterways workers and no envious graffiti artists. A Banksy, I had found a Banksy – joy; it was a
treasure hunt, one down, hundreds to go.

(A year later I went back along the canal to see how the hoodie was faring. Sadly he had not survived the war between Robbo and Banksy. The hoodie had been black-painted out of existence and
over this a great big red Rolling Stones tongue lolled out. Above the tongue was written ‘I SEE A BANKSY AND HAVE GOT TO PAINT IT BLACK’, while underneath it was signed ‘TEAM
ROBBO ROLLIN WITH THE STONES’. So much for my theory that the canal protected him.)

Encouraged by finding one Banksy, my next stop was Jamie Oliver’s restaurant Fifteen; three of Banksy’s many rats had once been lurking around here, but there was not a sign of them
now. Across the side of the restaurant’s van parked nearby was a message scrawled in graffiti-style writing:
personalised events created with love
. Although it was far too pink and
clean to be
real
– quite apart from what it said – nevertheless it was another example of graffiti crossing over into the mainstream.

From there I went to Moorfields Eye Hospital. The guide book said there used to be a rat holding a microphone outside a disused entrance to the hospital but in December
2007 ‘a great big bit of wood was nailed over it. Dare I assume that it will be available to buy at auction soon?’

Well, it was a reasonable enough question for Martin Bull to ask, but he was wrong – or rather wrong when I arrived there. Peering between the wood and the tiles I could just see
rat’s ears and the glint of a whisker. The rat was still there! On the street a man shuffled gingerly by, a huge patch over his eye, reminding me that this was one of the world’s
leading eye hospitals. But I was celebrating the fact that I had found a Banksy that the author of the guide book thought would have been lost years ago.

The next morning I wrote another email. This time to John Pelly, chief executive of Moorfields Eye Hospital, or rather to his PA in the hope that she would pass it on: