Banksy "One Nation Under CCTV" - tourists and beggars
The graffiti stencil artwork,"One Nation Under CCTV", presumably by "Banksy", which recently appeared in Newman Street in London, is definitely now a tourist attraction :
Here are some more Spy Blog photos and social observations:
The "One Nation Under CCTV" mural is on an otherwise ugly rendered gable end wall, which looks onto the vehicle parking yard and Newman Street entrance, for Post Office vans, belonging to the Rathbone Place mail sorting office:
Extra irony is added to the artwork by the presence of this Closed Circuit TeleVision "security" camera (we had to explain what the acronym "CCTV" stands for, to some possibly Scandinavian tourists) on the same wall, against which, three stories of scaffolding was apparently erected, in order to paint the mural.
Contrary to the impression given by the mainstream media published photos, closer inspection reveals the CCTV camera to be on a pan and tilt motorised mounting, but the operators do not seem to move its field of view at all. Like so many London CCTV cameras, it provides a convenient roosting perch for pigeons and other birds.
Lower left detail of the Private Security Guard and the Dog:
Lower right detail of the "Child in Hoodie" on a ladder "painting" the mural:
There is actually one visible "CCTV Warning" sign, butit says Consignia plc so it must be circa 2002, when the Post Office was temporarily afflicted with what The Register calls "whalesong Boutique Branding Consultancy" nonsense, from the Wolff Olins agency, who were also responsible for the literally headache and epileptic fit inducing new London 2012 Olympic Games logo.
If you look south down Newman Street, you can see the public CCTV surveillance camera "death star" dome, which is connected to a centralised control room and to the Police and security patrols there are 16 of these along Oxford Street).
The Post Office vehicle park is full of Post Office mail delivery / pickup vans, and there some more CCTV cameras on the corners of the main building and on adjacent buildings.
Neither these "Private" cameras nor the Pubic CCTV camera dome in Oxford Street, have worked as any sort of deterrent against criminal or anti-social behavior - there is a beggar wearing a baseball cap happily asking people for spare change sitting on the pavement by the motorcycles:
Whilst Spy Blog was taking these photos, tourists and passers by were stopping and taking photos on their cameras and camera phones, every few minutes. There were people from South Korea, France, Scandinavia and British and London people as well. These Londoners (?) even handed over their expensive looking mobile phone / camera, no doubt full of sensitive personal details, to a complete stranger (a foreign tourist) who they had only seen for a few seconds, and asked him to photograph them in front of the Banksy artwork. Luckily for them, he did not simply run off with their phone, with a head start of several metres;
