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Banksy is the anonymous, Bristol-born artist whose stencilled rats, children and one-line jokes turned street art into front-page news. The fifteen works below are among his best known: the walls of London, a cheeky detour into The Simpsons, a run of pieces across American cities in 2010 and 2011, and the images he left on and near the West Bank barrier. For each one you'll find where and when it appeared, what it shows and why people still talk about it.
How Banksy became Banksy
Graffiti was long seen as nothing more than vandalism. From the 1980s onwards, though, writers in New York, London, Bristol and elsewhere pushed it from quick tags into larger, more pictorial work, and by the 1990s "street art" had become a familiar label. Banksy emerged from that scene. Between about 1990 and 1994 he painted freehand in Bristol as part of the DryBreadZ Crew, and in 1997 he produced his first known large mural, The Mild Mild West, on Stokes Croft.
By 2000 he had switched to stencils. He has said the idea came while he was hiding from police under a rubbish lorry and noticed a stencilled serial number. Stencils are fast, which matters when painting illegally, and they gave his work the crisp, instantly readable look that became his signature. Despite years of speculation, he has never publicly confirmed his identity.
His reputation splits opinion. Admirers see a satirist who smuggles questions about war, consumerism and surveillance into everyday streets. Critics argue that a rebel whose canvases sell for millions at auction has become part of the system he mocks. Both views help explain why his work draws so much attention.
London walls
If Graffiti Changed Anything (2011)
stencilrevolution
This piece appeared overnight around Easter Monday 2011 on Clipstone Street in Fitzrovia, central London, and was confirmed as genuine when it went up on the artist's website. A small rat holds a paintbrush beneath dripping red capitals reading "If graffiti changed anything – it would be illegal." The line plays on the slogan "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal," which is often attributed to the anarchist Emma Goldman, although quotation researchers have found no evidence she wrote it.
Graffiti Removal Hotline
panoramio
A boy in a school-style uniform stands with a brush and a pot of paint beneath the words "Graffiti Removal Hotline" and a phone number that dribbles away into drips. The joke is that the graffiti is advertising its own removal service. Painted on a brick wall in London, it was one of the images that spread through books and early photo-sharing sites and helped move Banksy from underground name to public figure.
Yellow Lines Flower (2007)
widewalls.ch
On Pollard Street in Bethnal Green, east London, the double yellow lines that forbid parking curl off the road and climb the wall into a giant flower. A council road painter sits on the pavement beside it, roller in hand, as if taking a break. It turns a dull rule of the street into something playful and is a good example of how Banksy uses the real surroundings as part of the picture.
The Lifestyle You Ordered Is Currently Out of Stock
derilictlondon
Painted to look like an official notice on a blank billboard, this London piece reads: "Sorry! The lifestyle you ordered is currently out of stock." The estate agents' "For Sale" boards on the same building made the setting part of the message. It speaks to anyone who was promised prosperity and found the shop shelves, or the housing market, empty, and like much of his street work it did not survive long on the wall.
Pulp Fiction with bananas
complex
Banksy borrowed the famous shot of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson aiming pistols in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and swapped the guns for bananas. The mural, near Old Street in east London, became one of the city's best-loved Banksy sites. In April 2007 Transport for London painted over it under its policy of removing graffiti, and the loss of a work reportedly worth a large sum drew widespread criticism.
I Don't Believe in Global Warming (2009)
wsj.com
In December 2009 Banksy painted four murals on climate change to mark the end of the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen. In this one, beside a London canal, the words "I don't believe in global warming" are painted so low that the waterline swallows the bottom of the letters. The sceptic's slogan is quite literally going under, a joke that needs no explanation.
Girl with Balloon (2002)
stencilrevolution
A small girl reaches for a red heart-shaped balloon drifting away from her. The image first appeared in 2002 on the South Bank near Waterloo Bridge and was repeated around London, though none of those walls survive in place. In a 2017 Samsung poll of 2,000 UK adults it was named the nation's favourite artwork. In 2014 Banksy reworked it with a Syrian refugee girl for the campaign #WithSyria, and the same year Justin Bieber briefly posted a tattoo based on it, which Banksy reshared with the single word "Controversial."
Its most famous moment came on 5 October 2018, when a framed 2006 version sold at Sotheby's in London for £1,042,000. Seconds after the hammer fell, a shredder hidden in the frame sliced through the lower half of the canvas. Renamed Love Is in the Bin, it sold again at Sotheby's in October 2021 for £18,582,000.
On screen: The Simpsons
The "MoneyBart" opening (2010)
For the episode "MoneyBart," first shown on Fox on 10 October 2010, Banksy was credited with the opening sequence. It begins normally, with Bart writing "I must not write all over the walls" across the classroom, then the family settles on the couch and the camera pulls back to reveal a grim sweatshop where exhausted workers produce the show and its merchandise. Kittens are fed into a woodchipper to stuff Bart dolls, a unicorn's horn punches holes in DVDs, and the whole compound sits inside a barbed-wire 20th Century Fox logo.
The collaboration came from the show's side: executive producer Al Jean asked for it after seeing Banksy's film Exit Through the Gift Shop, and the artist sent back storyboards that were broadly what aired, with a few changes requested by Fox's standards department. Nelson Shin, founder of the Seoul studio that animates much of the show, protested that the sequence was degrading, and Jean stressed that none of the scenes was true.
Must Not Copy
stencilrevolution
A blond boy in a red T-shirt and blue shorts, his skateboard propped beside him, chalks "I must not copy what I see on the Simpsons" again and again on a painted blackboard. It mirrors Bart's chalkboard punishment at the start of each episode and teases the idea that television shapes how children behave. Images of the wall spread widely after the "MoneyBart" sequence, and it is widely credited to Banksy.
The American trips of 2010 and 2011
In 2010 Banksy's documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was later nominated for an Academy Award. New works appeared in the cities where it opened.
If At First You Don't Succeed, Call an Airstrike (2010)
via Flickr user Brian Hillegas
A child in a gas mask stands next to a red slogan reworking the old proverb "If at first you don't succeed, try again." It was one of five works that appeared around San Francisco in April 2010 to coincide with the film's local premiere. Painted while the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were dragging on, it is one of his bluntest anti-war statements.
Mickey Mouse billboard, Los Angeles (2011)
thedailycity
Early in 2011, in the weeks before the Oscars, Banksy blanketed Los Angeles with new work. On a CBS billboard carrying a nightclub advertisement for The Light Group, he added a leering, tongue-lolling Mickey Mouse with a martini glass reaching for the model, while Minnie Mouse looks on. The billboard was reportedly cleaned up within days, making it one of the shortest-lived pieces on this list.
I Remember When All This Was Trees (2010)
travisrobinsonwright.wordpress.com
In May 2010 Banksy left work in Detroit and nearby Warren. This one, a boy holding a paint can next to the words "I remember when all this was trees," was painted in the rubble of the abandoned Packard car plant, a symbol of the city's industrial decline. Members of a local gallery cut out the wall to save it, which led to a dispute over ownership, and in 2015 the mural was sold for $137,500.
Follow Your Dreams (2010)
quotevadis
A tired-looking workman holding a brush and paint bucket stands next to the words "Follow your dreams," stamped across with a red "Cancelled" sign. Banksy painted it in 2010 in Boston's Chinatown, on Essex Street. The same image opens this page, and it remains one of his sharpest comments on the gap between the promise of opportunity and many people's working lives.
The West Bank
The barrier paintings (2005)
all-that-is-interesting.com
In August 2005 Banksy painted nine images on the Israeli West Bank barrier, the concrete wall that separates parts of the West Bank from Israel. They included a ladder reaching over the top, children digging a hole through the wall, and this one: two comfortable armchairs and a curtained window opening onto a sunny mountain lake. Each image treats the wall as something to see through or escape, and together they drew international attention to the barrier.
The Flower Thrower (2003)
imgur
A masked young man winds up to throw, but instead of a stone or a petrol bomb he hurls a bunch of flowers, the only colour in the stencil. The original is on a wall in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, and dates from 2003. It has been copied onto posters, T-shirts and phone cases, and in September 2020 the European Union Intellectual Property Office ruled against Banksy's trademark on the image in a dispute with the greeting-card company Full Colour Black, finding it had been filed in bad faith.
Why these works last
Looking across the fifteen pieces, a few habits stand out. Banksy keeps text short and pictures simple, so a passer-by gets the joke in seconds. He uses the setting, a canal's waterline, a road marking, a CBS billboard, a ruined factory, as part of the work. And he aims at large targets: war, consumerism, official rules, the art market itself. The Sotheby's shredding showed that he can make a point even inside an auction room.
Much of the work on this list no longer exists on the street. Councils painted over some, owners removed others to sell, and weather and other artists did the rest. That impermanence is part of the point of street art, and also why photographs like these matter.
If you go looking for surviving pieces, check recent local reports first, respect private property, and remember that many murals are now behind protective screens or in galleries. Banksy's own website remains the usual way to confirm whether a new piece is genuinely his.
Sources: Wikipedia: Banksy; Wikipedia: List of works by Banksy; Wikipedia: MoneyBart; Wikipedia: Girl with Balloon; Fitzrovia News, June 2011; MyArtBroker: London's top Banksy murals; original list by The Richest. Photo credits as shown under each image.
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