Meeting Banksy in W-S-M.

We arrived in Weston-Super-Mare on Tuesday afternoon – myself and partner, my brother and his partner –  we were bringing my father back to visit his former home and friends. That evening the four of us took a stroll along the seafront. It was dark, 10.30 ish, the pier closed, donkeys put to bed and the evening tide retreating.

As we approached the site of the Tropicana, once an exotic outdoor lido where our children had swum, now derelict, laser beams appeared in the sky and the skeleton frame of a fairy castle with turrets rose above high fences and barriers, its ragged flags fluttering in the wind off the sea. As we got closer we could just make out a scaffold horse and the upturned wheels of a truck. Everything else remained hidden.

When we asked the security guards patrolling the area what was going on we were told it was ‘filming,’ they knew nothing more. But the whisper of Bristol’s favourite son, Banksy’s name was already in the air. ‘I love him, he’s a genius,’ said a passerby. When we asked who, ‘Banksy of course,’ she said.

The guards denied it. The town denied it, but two days later we discovered we had been among the first visitors to get a glimpse of Dismaland, Banksy’s pop-up dystopian theme park, an intriguing, highly political and apocalyptic spectacle in a seaside town struggling under the weight of recession.

As we made our way back along the front a young homeless boy walked beside us for a while, he was off to find a doorway in town to sleep in he said. My sister-in-law gave him a twenty pound note (please note, her living is modest). It was very generous and I think Banksy would have been proud.