When a new piece of Banksy art emerges during lockdown and you’ve little to do socially because of Covid, why not make your next scooter riding destination a side street in Nottingham to check it out?
Like many, we’ve been fans of Banksy’s work for a number of years now. Back in 2009 we stopped off on our ride home from a scooter rally in Weston-super-Mare to visit the ‘Banksy Vs Bristol Museum’ exhibition.
For those that didn’t go it was very clever indeed, both with regards to his own view on the world and also how and what he exhibited around the museum. He took over the entire place, and it was interesting to ‘people watch’ as some visitors only stopped by the obvious Banksy works, photographing them before moving straight on to the next, bypassing what at first-glance appeared to be the ‘boring normal museum stuff.’ In fact if you took time to enjoy the whole museum you could find examples of his work cleverly displayed alongside old clay pipes and the like from Bristol life. It was a great day out.
Next on the list was Dismaland in Weston-super-Mare itself in 2015. Guess what? We visited that on our scooters too, while en route to Woolacombe scooter rally in September of that year.
Another very clever and interesting exhibition, Banksy on this occasion taking over the derelict Tropicana venue on the seafront and creating his own, thought-provoking theme park by the sea. The fact there was drizzle in the air for the latter part of our evening visit seemed perfect really…
Nottingham’s latest street art was again visited by scooter, my 1962 Lambretta Li 150, one damp afternoon last week. We parked it up for a photo, and yes the irony of parking the Lambretta under ‘mass produced’ graffiti isn’t lost on us: Innocenti produced almost 143,000 of that model alone.
As for the tenuous link to Slacker, he hand-painted the side panels of my old Lambretta, sign-writing the ScooterNova magazine lettering on each one. Not graffiti of course, and indeed paid for by myself, but to be fair Slacker is a lot easier to track down for a commission than Banksy is. If you search ‘Slacker-the-Pinstriper’ on social media you can find him and strike a deal fairly easily.
As for getting Banksy to paint some old scooter side panels for me, well he has proved a little more difficult to find. Maybe one day…
By the way, if you’re a fan of both Banksy and classic scooters, then you might want to check out the feature on this customised Lambretta GP owned by ‘Stonki’ in Germany and themed on Banksy’s artwork. It was published in edition 12 of ScooterNova magazine and back issues are available from our secure online shop. The cover artwork for edition 12 of ScooterNova magazine was designed and drawn by Weston-super-Mare artist and scooterist Carfy, who on a ‘mysterious’ and ‘hard to get hold of’ level is somewhere between Banksy and Slacker. That said Carfy is a good friend and we do have a number for him, if anyone is interested…
** ScooterNova is an independent scooter magazine, published in the UK by scooterists for scooterists. Available in all good scooter shops, on subscription and via mail-order, the brand new edition 22 is published on 1 November 2020. For more information and to visit our online shop, please go to www.scooternova.com
