Stories on Banksy’s identity ‘revealed’ has been come out in 2017, 2023, 2024. Burt now in 2026, this is the reveal. What a let-down. How good can this be when it is revealed that his identity is Robin Gunningham, from Bristol, England in his early 50s. He has changed his name a number of times with the latest, in 2008, being David Jones, one of the most common names in Britain.
And the Banksy name? It says it was a pseudonym from a play on his rumoured real name Robin Gunningham, evolving from the tag Robin Banks into Banksy. Or maybe after the famous England Goalkeeper Gordon Banks. Or from an interview in 2023 when asked if Banksy is called Robert Banks, he responded that his forename is Robbie.” His repeated reason for anonymity is that graffiti is illegal.
He’s so astonishingly creative. Here’s just one story from Wikipedia:
£10 Notes
In August 2004, Banksy produced a quantity of spoof British £10 notes replacing the picture of the Queen's head with Diana, Princess of Wales’s head and changing the text "Bank of England" to "Banksy of England". Someone threw a large wad of these into a crowd at Notting Hill Carnival that year, which some recipients then tried to spend in local shops. These notes were also given with invitations to a Santa's Ghetto exhibition by Pictures on Walls. The individual notes have since been selling on eBay. A wad of the notes was also thrown over a fence and into the crowd near the NME signing tent at the Reading Festival. A limited run of 50 signed posters containing ten uncut notes was also produced and sold by Pictures on Walls for £100 each to commemorate the death of Princess Diana. One of these sold in October 2007 at Bonhams auction house in London for £24,000.
He did mention he wanted anonymity because graffiti is illegal…so forgery can be added to that. And he said in his film Exit Through the Gift Shop he has forged a total of £100 million notes, saying he still owns most of them. OK that makes the forgery charge seem possible.
What about the criminal damage and property defacement. There are thousands of images over a career spanning more than 30 years. Under UK law, a maximum of 20 years in prison would be likely, or not. Who knows? The person who removed the Banksy mural in Ukraine faced up to 12 years in prison. The theft of a Banksy work in Paris got sentences up to 4 years. A man who defaced Banksy murals in Utah got 5 years of probation. So it looks like a game of Banksy defacing versus defacing Banksy,
Banksy jokes are few and mostly just odd. I choose this one:
Banksy walks into a bar. Or did he? No one knows because “he” left a stencil of a rat holding a pint on the wall and he vanished before the tab came.
Take a look at this small representation of the hundreds of “Rat Holding Something” images.
