THE WALL,
BANKSY’S HOLIDAY PLANS,
AND THE HIDDEN MANIFESTO.
It’s the Summer of 1965, and the neighbourhood around The House is part industrial estate and part holiday camp. Odd part of the world.
The council spontaneously decides to slice off a piece of The House’s front garden to install a bus stop.
A gateway for the Great British holiday next to the gasworks.
The Bus Stop and The Wall stand together for the next fifty years and the citizens of Yarmouth get to work on The Wall.
Lovers carved initials. Kids scrawled tags. The decades recorded as layered stories of inscriptions and dust.
The Wall becomes a living noticeboard. Part protest, part confession booth, part unintentional art gallery.
The town changes its rhythm. The holidaymakers thin out. The fishing boats vanish over the horizon. And over time Yarmouth is forgotten.
And then Banksy turns up, and The wall is no longer just a wall. It’s a headline.
THE GREAT BRITISH
SPRAYCATION
It’s the summer of 2021, and the good citizens of the UK are released from their second COVID lockdown. Like the rest of the population, Banksy holidays on the beaches of The UK.
He gets in his camper van, drives east and gets busy, dropping ten pieces around the East Anglian coast. Social commentary disguised as seaside fun. Or maybe the other way around.
And he kindly makes a film, verifying he’s the artist, entitled - The Great British Spraycation.
The world wakes up and descends on Great Yarmouth and the surrounding towns. Journalists, pundits, opportunists.
The Banksy is encased in a frame, pieces get vandalised, the art critics dissect and prognosticate over the meaning.
Then, predictably, the brick-cutter-wielding art establishment descend. Pieces are cut from walls. Millions swap hands.
Hype. Destruction. Greed. The Spraycation becomes a spreadsheet.
Same Old Story.
ONLY ONE PIECE
ESCAPES UNSCATHED.
The Story of The Daves
Meanwhile in a pub in East London, an improbable number of Daves, meet over pints around table 43.
One of them owns the house. All of them have an opinion.
What to do with The Banksy? What to do with The House?
The conversation circles, wobbles, lands. They all agree:
The Banksy Stays on The Wall.
But then what? A decision's one thing. They needed a vision, a manifesto, a spark.
So they went back to the beginning, to The Wall, to Banksy and the image he left behind. Why this house? Why that stencil? WTF was he thinking when he got in his camper van and drove east?
And they discovered the answer, a proto-manifesto hidden in an old Banksy quote from his books Wall & Piece, that gave a clue to the origin of the art and a vision of what to do with The House.
The Never Boring Foundation
The quote gave birth to a vision.
The vision inspired a mission.
The mission brought forth The Never Boring Foundation.
