British Quest

[BARELY VISIBLE] Banksy’s playful Bubble Slide Girl mural was painted onto the sidewall of a youth club in Hackney around February 2008. Unfortunately, only a faint outline of this work is still visible since it has been removed. The image depicts a little girl blowing bubbles and using a drainpipe as a slide. It’s a great example of one of Banksy’s more positive works through which he might be trying to tell us that through play and maintaining a childlike, light-hearted spirit, we can always find a silver lining and adapt to whatever harsh circumstance.

Banksy’s Cash Machine Girl was created in May 2008, close to Exmouth Market in North London. The artwork depicts a young girl being lifted by the eerie robotic arm emerging from a cash machine.

This mural appeared on a wall in The Grange in Bermondsey, South London in 2010. The artwork was boarded over shortly after. It’s one of Banksy’s most well-known images of a hooded man with a barking dog on a leash that is a tribute to legendary artist Keith Haring’s Barking Dog. There is a sharp contrast between the cartoon-like dog and its master’s hyper realistic representation. Banksy often references other famous artists in his work, such as Andy Warhol in Soup Can.

These two pieces of graffiti are among Banksy’s earliest works in the British capital, located in the courtyard of the night club Cargo in the heart of Shoreditch, now protected with perspex. This courtyard is a hub for various well-known graffiti artists, including French artists C215 and Thierry Noir, Israeli artists from Broken Fingaz Crew and the Italian artist, Ozmo. Banksy acknowledges Rivington Street’s legacy in Designated Graffitti Area, also known as Guard Dog, with the ironic, self-explanatory text. The figurative element, Guard Dog is a mockery of the police and the authorities, depicting a policeman and his poodle on patrol in a designated graffiti area.

I love Robot Rat is another example of the graffiti war between Banksy and Robbo. Painted on Chiswell Street in Islington, Banksy’s piece depicts a stencilled ghetto rat holding a placard which originally read “London doesn’t work”, which he created in 2004. Later it received a tag from Robbo, who reworked the placard by adding his own name in red letters.

Banksy’s If Graffiti Changed Anything It Would Be Illegal mural is located on a wall on Clipstone Street, Fitzrovia and appeared overnight on Easter Monday in 2011. It depicts one of Banksy’s iconic rats underneath the writing in red reading, “If graffiti changed anything, it would be illegal”. This is a reference to a quote by 20th century political activist Emma Goldman who campaigned for Women’s rights, her words were: “If voting ever changed anything, it would be illegal”.

The quirky Phone Tap mural can be found in a small car park on Chrisp Street in East London, just two minutes away from All Saints DLR station. It has been quite intact since 2011 even though there are some multicoloured paint splatters around it. It’s one of the examples of how Banksy incorporates the natural urban environment into his murals – he depicts a phone ringing to an actual water tap on the street.

Also known as the Falling Shopper, this Banksy mural is located on Bruton Lane on the side of a large office building in the heart of the commercial West End district. Impressively, the mural was painted in November 2011 in broad daylight. A scaffolding and a tarpaulin were used to make sure nobody caught the artist red-handed. Shop Till You Drop is still visible, even if quite damaged. Looming over passers-by from over two storeys high, it depicts a woman with a full shopping trolley mid-fall from the top of a building. Banksy’s aim was to point out the dangers of consumerism, which is a topic he revisits often in his limited editions prints such as in the work Festival (Destroy Capitalism). Banksy’s critique of consumerism and capitalism is one of the most controversial themes of his art, not least because his artworks— in particular, Banksy’s record-breaking originals— frequently sell for very large sums of money. Explore our take on the matter in Banksy and Capitalism: Critic or Champion?

This Banksy stencil figure appeared on Jeffrey Street in Camden in June 2011, as an addition to graffiti artist Daniel Halpin’s, aka Tox’s, tag. Tox was previously convicted for tagging multiple locations in London over a period of three years and was mocked as ‘no Banksy’ by the prosecution due to his lack of creative artistry with his graffiti works.

Also known as Tesco Kids, Banksy’s Very Little Helps mural is located on Essex Road, North London. Painted in 2008 on the side of a pharmacy, the artwork depicts a group of three children ceremoniously pledging their allegiance to the British supermarket chain Tesco while one of them is raising a Tesco carrier bag on a flagpole. The image is a critique on society’s reliance on mass consumerism and multinational corporations. Banksy also released Very Little Helps as a print in 2008.

Banksy’s Wallpaper Hanging is a vibrant piece of street art located beside Regent’s Canal tunnel and under the London Transport Police Headquarters in Camden. The mural, painted in 2009, represents a city worker in Banksy’s iconic stencil style, covering the work of another graffiti artist painted in 1985 with grey wallpaper.

The large-scale, striking Yellow Flower mural on Pollard Street around Bethnal Green is another example of Banksy’s use of existing features of the urban landscape to complete his work. He painted an extension the double yellow lines of the road across the pavement to crawl up the wall and bloom into a bright, cartoonish yellow flower that is in fact quite different from his usual style. With a street artwork as large as this one, and as reliant on its original situation to make sense, it becomes particularly clear Why Artworks From The Street Rarely Make It To Auction.