Over the course of the last nine days, the artist Banksy has been out daily painting animals at various locations across London. As publicity goes it's been a summer season masterstroke.
Some have since been removed, some have been screened off, some have been further vandalised but most are still in situ, for now.
I blogged about the first five last week. I've since been on safari around London to try to see the rest. [9 photos]
If nothing else these animals have been geographically well spread and it was now the turn of northwest London to get the surreptitious overnight treatment. The chosen surface was a particularly dilapidated billboard on the Edgware Road, just up from Lidl and Cricklewood Bus Garage. It's the sort of place Banksy could have turned up with a ladder on a Friday night and passers-by wouldn't have blinked, not unless they twigged he was adding a small stencil rather than a full-sized poster. The animal which appeared here was a crouching cat, its gaze fixed on a small hole in the wooden panels, but in the absence of any prey the impact was somewhat muted. Alas by the time I arrived the following day there was nothing to see, just a somewhat overgrown frame beside the railway bridge, its brief moment in the spotlight rapidly quashed.
On Saturday afternoon the cat had been covered over by a blackboard after police turned up to marshal crowds milling unsafely in the road. Everything was then removed by contractors who claimed the billboard was due to be taken down next week anyway and the date had been brought forward for safety reasons. They also said the cat would be going in a skip if it wasn't claimed, or that it'd be stored safely in their yard, or alternatively donated to a museum - they left having told witnesses allsorts. Rest assured they confirmed their identity with police so it's not a total scam, but it does sound like a group of chancers grabbing an unexpected windfall without giving due thought to which lie to use as a cover story.
This fish tank was the odd one out, a proper artwork rather than a silhouette, and took an audacious swipe at the City of London Police by graffiting its property. It's also the only artwork I visited so early that absolutely nobody else was around so I had the entire exhibit to myself, which was ace. A speculative social media search often allows premature bragging rights, so never wait for the BBC news story or Banksy's Instagram confirmation if you want to see these things in an unsullied state. And there it was partway down Ludgate Hill, a sentry box gleaming in the sunlight with fish swimming in the windows... oh hang on, an aquarium full of piranhas. I sat inside on the police officer's seat and let it all wash over me.
It wouldn't last. First the crowds came, spurred by widespread publicity, making all those line of sight shots much harder to grab. Then a contractor turned up and erected a set of barriers around the box, leaving the fishy windows in plain sight but preventing access to the inside. Later the City of London took steps to protect its property by removing the entire box and placing it off limits outside the Guildhall. They said they were "working through options to preserve the artwork", perhaps by putting in on display inside a secure public building, indeed I could see it being a big hit inside the new London Museum when it opens. If nothing else the box's withdrawal means Banksy has achieved something civil rights protestors have failed to do over three decades - he's made a chink in the Ring of Steel.
To Charlton, and not the nice bit but a grubby access road on an industrial estate in Charlton Riverside. It's very near the Thames Barrier and if you've ever been you probably had the sense to walk along the parallel landscaped path instead. I can't overemphasise enough how unsuitable Westmoor Street is for inquisitive onlookers, its pavements entirely blocked by the parked cars of those making a living here, forcing pedestrians out into the road where they might be sideswiped by a stream of passing tipper trucks. Standing back to admire the rhino painted on the wall should not be attempted without looking both ways first. Also you're already too late to see it properly.
Originally a clapped out Nissan Micra was parked here, the rhino painted in such a way to look like it was mounting the hatchback, but by the time I arrived on Tuesday the car had vanished. Also the rhino's groin had been thoughtlessly tagged the previous evening by a hooded teenager who'd turned up with a spraycan and walked off to a chorus of onlooker disapproval. Where I got lucky is that a man with a van was attempting to cover the rhino with plastic sheeting but had so far only affixed two sides of the frame. Visitors took their chance to pose in front of the rhino while he popped up a ladder and added a third side, and by mid-afternoon Charlton's rhino was as shielded as Kew's goat. In this case it turns out the man with a van was an employee of RMS Skips, the yard on whose back wall Banksy's work is painted, although Darryl reckons the ultimate financial beneficiaries may be Greenwich council because they own the whole site.
And finally to what's now the obvious final location, London Zoo. Overnight one of the shutters at the main entrance gained an artwork of a gorilla lifting the metalwork to allow a sealion and various birds to escape underneath. Staff at the Zoo were first to notice because they get in early to look after the animals, and Banksy gave an earlier than usual Instagram confirmation to seal the series. By the time I turned up two groups of visitors had converged, those here to see the artwork and the usual 10am rush of families with small children come for a day out at the zoo. A large number of staff had been deployed outside to try to keep the two streams separate, and had also placed a ring of barriers at a reasonable distance which encouraged the media professionals to clamber up onto a row of planters for a better shot.
Officials here intend to keep Gorilla & Friends, even though its canvas covers one of the entrances, although this will likely mean replacing the shutter and displaying the graffitied version somewhere inside the Zoo. For now I see they too have covered their artwork with two sheets of plastic, preventing external damage but also adding an annoying reflective sheen which makes viewing conditions less than satisfactory. I'm surprised by how upbeat the Zoo are about the artwork, given Banksy's underlying message appears to be 'FFS Let The Animals Out', but these days any publicity is good publicity. If the gorilla's been removed by the time you get there perhaps do what I did and walk a minute up the road to watch actual giraffes feeding in plain view, because the real thing ought to be more exciting than a stencil.
