He is one of Bristol’s most famous exports, but after a time where it seemed there wasn’t a wall, bridge or building safe from Banksy’s spray cans and stencils, this month marks four whole years since he painted in his home city.
The elusive street artist and his work in Bristol continue to attract visitors to the city – there is rarely a moment in daylight when there isn’t a tourist taking a selfie at the bottom of Park Street of the now 18-year-old ‘Well-Hung Lover’ – but fans of Banksy hoping for more works in the city of his birth have been left disappointed in recent years.
The last time that Banksy painted a wall in Bristol – that we know of or that he has claimed – was in December 2020, when he created ‘Aachoo!!’, a work showing a woman sneezing on the side of a house at the bottom of Vale Street in Totterdown – England’s steepest residential street.
Despite being painted in the midst of Covid travel restrictions, people came from far and wide to see the new Banksy work, although the work of art was sold by the owners of the house, who went to the lengths of removing the entire wall and rebuilding the home to do it.
That artwork in December 2020 came at the end of a year which began with the second most recent Banksy work in Bristol – a Valentine’s Day reveal of the girl with the balloon, except this time she had burst the balloon with a catapult.
This large mural appeared on the side of a house in Marsh Lane, Barton Hill, and again brought thousands of people to view it.
Within five weeks, the country was in the first Covid lockdown, and the work in Barton Hill was, over the next couple of years, damaged, graffitied over and covered up so that now, it can’t practically be seen at all.
Banksy’s only other involvement in Bristol in this entire decade so far has been two works of art connected with the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in June 2020.
Within a few days, with the debate about whether the statue of the slave trader should be returned to its plinth in The Centre, he published a sketch showing his idea for a new sculpture, showing the statue back on its plinth, but with a group of people permanently shown in the act of toppling it.
Eighteen months later, in December 2021, he produced thousands of t-shirts depicting the Colston plinth, which sold at independent stores in the city on a certain day, raising funds for the defence of the four people charged with criminal damage of the statue itself.
So, since Aachoo!! four years ago, Bristol has had an online sketch and t-shirts and one other work of art that no one saw. The makers of the Bristol-set crime caper The Outlaws said they got Banksy to paint a small mural on a wall at the community centre in Sea Mills which was the on location set for much of the first two series. The work, supposedly by Banksy, was painted over by Christopher Walken’s character at the end of the series.
Instead of painting in Bristol, Banksy has been busy, with a series of works of art in London on an animal theme this summer, various works of art in London over the past couple of years, and a spell in Ukraine in November 2022.
There is one final Bristol connection in the past four years – this June, he created and launched a life-size inflatable dinghy with models of asylum seekers on board to surf over the crowd during the set of Bristol band Idles at this year’s Glastonbury Festival – specifically during Idles’ song Danny Ndelko, about the positive impact of immigration.