Banksy (11 page)

I sent it off and forgot about it.

From Moorfields I went via five disappeared rats and one disappeared smiley policeman to a friendly-looking rat with a CND sign around his neck, holding a placard that, according to the guide
book, said ‘London doesn’t work’. Amazingly, given the fact that he was
close to the Barbican, right on the edge of the City, he had survived. But the
placard now read ‘I
♥
LONDON’ (with the heart designating ‘love’ painted in red) and then in red: ‘ROBBO’. So the
‘war’ between Banksy and Robbo had escaped the boundaries of the canal and any Banksy, particularly any Banksy rat holding a placard, was fair game.

Thus on a wall behind the Royal Mail sorting office off Rosebery Avenue there was a rat by the bus stop, which was the first Banksy I had ever spotted. The rat was holding a placard which used
to read ‘ALWAYS FAIL’ – and my guide book informed me that this was the rhyming slang nickname for the Royal Mail. But when I returned to see how the rat was faring, his placard
again advertised TEAM ROBBO. However, when I next wanted the bus down to King’s Cross the placard was slogan-less, even though the rat was still there. I thought at first this was
Banksy’s own clean-up team in action, but Robbo later told me he had chosen the wrong paint – ‘It faded because the ink was shit.’

I made a detour from the guide book up to Camden Lock to see what else Banksy had done on the night he had painted over Robbo’s signature. The cleverest painting simply read (in graffiti
scrawl) ‘I DON’T BELIEVE IN GLOBAL WARMING’. In itself this was not a particularly original thought, but it was written so close to the canal that you could almost see the water
rising inch by inch, year by year and eventually drowning this disbelief. But Robbo had been there and whitewashed key parts of it so it now read ‘I DON’T BELIEVE IN WAR’, and
then by the side of it he added ‘IT’S TOO LATE FOR THAT SONNY. TEAM ROBBO.’ The rest of the Banksys along the canal had suffered the same sort of treatment.

Back on the guided tour, the book told me that in Fabric, the grooviest of nightclubs around Smithfield, was a Banksy bomb hugger sprayed on the wall by the toilets. ‘They even put a frame
around it.’ So I put in what I thought was going to be an easy request to Fabric’s head of press to come in and take a look at it out of nightclub hours. What
followed was a good introduction to the weird world of Banksy.

You would think that at this point it would be easy. I was not exactly asking for a private viewing of the Sistine Chapel. But back came her reply:

Many months later a good friend suggested that I had been a little bit wet in not just going there. So, one damp Friday night, having already bought a ticket online and attempted to groove
myself up a little (orange sneakers and a sad O’Neill surf shirt!), I managed to talk my way through the army of the club’s doormen and security guards, who were perplexed by this
off-the-age-scale single man. They didn’t quite dare to be brutally ageist about it and simply turn me away but instead warned me of a ‘very heavy drum ’n’ bass night’
in the forlorn hope that I might just disappear.

Once in I felt a bit like a potholer must feel when he’s not sure which way is safe. Marky and Friends were playing in one room, Urban Nerds in another, and amidst
all this massive noise and crowd the idea of hunting down Banksy seemed absurd. But all of a sudden I came across it by mistake, right next to the toilets: a Banksy bomb hugger all alone on a wall
and protected by a nice antiquey frame. There was too little light to judge how good a piece it was, but it really didn’t matter too much. It was a well-preserved Banksy in its original
context; it spoke of the early, uncomplicated days in his life and the fact that there was none of the usual fuss; that few people even seemed to notice it somehow added to the appeal. It had been
worth the effort and I left while my eardrums were still intact.

Onwards. The rat on a street called Exmouth Market, famous now for Moro’s restaurant rather than any market, had gone together with the video shop it had been painted on. In the plaster,
which had been whitewashed over, a few small holes were visible as though an eager archaeologist had picked at the surface in the hope of finding a hidden rat underneath. A few doors along the
newsagent’s box with a Banksy on it had long gone, along with the Banksy. Someone will have made a killing.

One street away, however, there was still a large Banksy to be seen – just. Mark Ellis, a builder, was asked by the landlord of a derelict shop to come in and do it up. As he was prising
off a large piece of rusting metal next to the shop window, there on the wall beneath it was a Banksy. ‘I called Laurie, my daughter about it. I said, “You are not going to believe
this, but there’s a Banksy here.” When she saw it she thought she’d won the Lottery. She said “Oh god, you’ve got to preserve it.” It was in a dreadful state
when we found it, absolutely mullered. Someone had already rollered over
it. We cleaned it right up. We framed it. Put a bit of Perspex over it. Don’t look too bad, does
it?’

Well, it doesn’t look too bad, but it doesn’t look too good either. It’s an odd one this; in the early photographs it was simply a cash machine stencilled on a bricked-up
window with ‘Di faced tenners’ (a £10 note with a portrait of Lady Di replacing the Queen’s head) spewing out on to the pavement. At some point most of the tenners had been
done away with, to be replaced by an evil-looking robotic arm that was stretching out from the machine and lifting a terrified schoolgirl up off her feet into the machine. But this in turn had been
attacked and largely ruined by someone who had roller-painted two white lines down it. Finally it had been given a Perspex protective shield by Mark Ellis.

His daughter had just finished university and they decided to go into business together. They would sell bagels to all the office workers nearby looking for a quick lunch. And what would they
call it? Banksy Bagel Bar, and the bagels would have ‘a Banksy edge’ to them. I don’t know about a ‘Banksy edge’, but I was thankful to the guide book for leading me
to their smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel with seeds on top. The survival of this piece illustrates once again just how far Banksy’s appeal stretches, for no one has ever cared to name
their shop Seurat’s Sandwiches, Kahlo’s Coffee Bar, Picasso’s Pizza or Hopper’s Hamburgers. Just Banksy Bagels.

‘When we first opened there were twenty people or more coming by daily to take snaps of it,’ says Mark Ellis. ‘We still have loads of people coming to see it. Loads of
Japanese.’ As we talk a young woman stops in her tracks, pulls out her mobile phone and snaps what is, at this point, quite a sadly defaced Banksy. ‘You get three or four of them a day,
the phone merchants . . . We get a few
eccentrics coming in about it as well. Sort of well-to-do people who have lost their way in life a little bit. Seems to be a little bit
of a statement for them.’ But not enough of these eccentrics, photo-taking Japanese and fans were buying their excellent bagels, and a year after I saw him the business was for sale. A few
months on it had become Diana’s Dry Cleaners. The Banksy on the wall next to it looked even more forlorn.

From gentrified Exmouth Market I trailed up to very ungentrified New North Road, where Banksy’s girl with a balloon had disappeared along with her balloon. Disappointing, because the
photographs show a very poignant image: a little girl has let go of her red heart-shaped balloon which is floating away, its string still trailing – has she just lost her balloon or is she
deliberately letting it go? It had not merely been whitewashed over; it had been replaced by a set of five toasters – yes, toasters. Four relatively small ones and one very elegant one about
six foot high and ten foot across, set on an orange and white background. Obviously immense care and skill had gone into these toasters. But a toaster as art? Again the internet came to the rescue.
According to the Nelly Duff gallery in Shoreditch the Toaster Movement was ‘born on a cold New Year’s Eve in 1998, over a kitchen table in Wolverhampton. The Toaster project started
life as an idea of how to make a mundane object famous, subverting the image by its placement and its graphic rendering. The Toaster project grew and has inevitably over the years created more
questions than answers along the way.’ These toasters on the wall were all questions and no answers. But certainly they were a lot more life enhancing than the depressing squiggles in the
nearby streets.

From toasters I moved to helicopters: Banksy’s huge Happy Chopper, off Old Street, an ugly-looking, heavily armed attack
helicopter with a pretty pink bow on top
which somehow made it look even more menacing. ‘HAVE A NICE DAY’ was stencilled alongside it, although you knew that the chopper was promising anything but. It had outlived the previous
occupant that sat below it, Franco’s Fish and Chip, and now sat on top of Wa Do Chinese fast food. But the Happy Chopper was in trouble, for it had been surrounded, and although huge it was
still very hard to find: above Wa Do there was a rampart high enough to partly obscure the bottom of the painting, while the top had been wholly concealed by a large electronic billboard. But by
crossing the road and standing to one side I saw that the Happy Chopper was still there, although covered in large Perspex sheets hanging down in strips in front of it. Again it illustrates our
slightly tortured view of Banksy. Is it here today and gone tomorrow – no worries? Or is it here today, so it’s got to be preserved – it’s worth too much to be gone
tomorrow? In its present position it might as well not exist at all.

Sometimes it seems that Banksy can’t win. He usually paints in fairly derelict areas of a city, but far from bringing down the neighbourhood even further a Banksy or two is often a sure
sign that the neighbourhood is on the way up – where Banksy goes the gentry will follow. In Brooklyn, New York, a property developer used a Banksy skipping girl to help sell their $900,000
apartments at ‘Urban Green – New York City’s most exciting destination’. (It did not do them much good, the banking crisis proved more powerful than even Banksy and put paid
to the development for some years.) But in Hoxton I discovered that Banksy’s ‘DESIGNATED PICNIC AREA’, neatly stencilled on the entrance steps of an unoccupied building, has been
washed off and the steps now lead to a newly opened estate agent catering to just the sort of people who might now buy a Banksy.

An even more complicated case of the Banksy effect is illustrated by a pub called the Foundry, near the Happy Chopper. In a previous life it was a Barclays Bank but when
the banks started closing branches it had been turned into a pub/art gallery. It would be hard to imagine anything less like a bank than this. Inside it was undoubtedly the grungiest pub I have
ever been in and, somehow, all the better for it; outside the wide pavement was a favourite spot for dispatch riders who could sit with a drink and watch the traffic go by instead of fighting it.
Inside I discovered that there were two Banksys still in existence, but in a rather relaxed setting. The downstairs of the pub had graffiti on every spare space, even on the ceilings – the
ladies’ loo was just as overwhelmed as the gents’. ‘It’s an artistic dialogue going on here,’ said one of the barmen. ‘We don’t judge, we leave it to the
artists to make their own decisions.’ Banksy’s Grin Reaper, equipped with traditional scythe, black cloak and hood, but with a smiley face underneath instead of the usual skeletal one,
was here, and a much smaller version of the Happy Chopper too, although it was more difficult to spot under rival graffiti. They were both still very much alive and visible amidst a lot of dross,
so it was encouraging to see that in this ‘artistic dialogue’ in the pits of Old Street good art had triumphed over bad.