Waking up with a Banksy on your wall: The differing fortunes of two homeowners
Sam was lying in bed one morning when her tenant in a house she owned in Margate sent her a photo of a piece of graffiti that had appeared on the wall outside.
Astonishingly, it looked like a Banksy. It would turn out to be perhaps the graffiti artist's most interesting new artwork of recent years, Valentine's Day Mascara (pictured above), which was revealed in Margate on Valentine's Day, 2023.
Bamboozled, Sam googled: what do you do when you wake up with a Banksy on your wall?
"What did Google say about that?" I asked her.
"Nothing! And I was like, I need to contact the council, I need to find an art gallery who can advise me."
Sam called Julian Usher at Red Eight Gallery. Julian's team, conscious that new Banksys are under immediate threat from street cleaners, the weather, rival graffiti artists and other art dealers, promised he'd be in Margate within the hour: "We knew we had to get the piece covered," say Julian.
And there was another reason Julian got to Margate double-quick: if Banksy chooses your wall for one of his drawings, you could be seriously in the money.
For the second season of my BBC Radio 4 podcast The Banksy Story, which is called When Banksy Comes To Town, I've been following the very different fates of two sets of homeowners who wake up one day to find a Banksy on their wall. The season shows just how important his graffiti becomes for a local community – and why people disagree so vehemently about what should happen after it's discovered.
Sam became the custodian of Valentine's Day Mascara, which speaks to the theme of domestic violence, incidents of which usually spike each Valentine's Day. It's a complicated bit of work. A peppy 50s housewife with a black eye has bludgeoned her partner. A real pan with flecks of red is at her feet, and his painted legs are upended into the real fridge-freezer that Banksy left by the wall. A broken plastic chair testifies to the fight they have had.
Later on the day it appeared, refuse collectors arrived to spirit away the fridge-freezer. This precipitated a free-for-all, with the public helping themselves to the remnants. It was mayhem.
A media scrum, a wrong-footed local council, millions of global onlookers. Exactly, one suspects, what Banksy wanted.
And this time, just for laughs, he left behind oil painter Peter Brown, commissioned to capture the scenes he would miss. I spoke to Pete "The Street" Brown for my series. "The whole reason I was employed was because Banksy was questioning what was the art about," Pete explained. "Is it about the graffiti? Or is it about the reaction afterwards, and what happens to it?"
As luck would have it, Pete was captured on video just as Banksy's team were putting the finishing touches to Valentine's Day Mascara – a video that The Banksy Story managed to obtain. In it we can see that one of Banksy's team let a local kid play with their drone.
"They're in the process of putting a large piece on a wall and yet they're taking the time to teach a kid how to fly a drone," says Steph Warren, who used to work with Banksy and who appeared in my first series - about the artist's rise and rise. "Very sweet!"
Alongside Sam, I've been following the story of Gert and Gary. They, like Sam, did not want me to use their last name. A 30ft-high seagull appeared one morning on the wall of their buy-to-let in Lowestoft in Suffolk. The bird needed to be massive for Banksy's ambitious visual gag to work. The artist had shoved large yellow insulation strips into a skip that now looked like a fast-food container that the seagull divebombed to steal chips.