There’s a University myth that gets flogged regularly to boggle-eyed first years during freshers’ week. Two mathmos scrawling an elaborately-detailed double helix on the front quad of Johns’ college, overnight, guerrilla-style, after the porters had gone to bed. Maybe when you heard it, it was at Trinity and involved NatScis, but who cares? The porters arrived, and, in the manner of the Roman Soldiers correcting the grammar of Monty Python’s Brian, ordered that they wash it all off. They probably did not even get sent down. Graffiti culture in Cambridge town centre amounts to little more than the odd tag sneaked by a Hills Road Sixth-Former in a Green Day hoodie. Last weekend, minor consternation was caused by the nonsensical scrawlings of some chalky-fingered self-styled poet on the pavement outside Senate House: ‘If you step here a song you sing’ and ‘If you step here to violence you turn’.  Passers-by admitted they “almost dropped their Sainsbury’s bags” trying to read it. Carnage. What can be said about a town whose graffiti culture finds its apotheosis a sign saying ‘To the river’ which gets washed away every time we have a light rain shower?

It is not as if the future of graffiti culture nationwide is looking any more colourful. Less than two weeks ago, a Banksy work involving three grannies bowling bombs was sold at Sotheby’s (doubtless over tea and crumpets) for just over £100,000. Paris Hilton has turned from Banksy victim in 2006 to Banksy owner in 2007. The artist’s real identity is hidden, supposedly for fear of his arrest, though the BBC website, (along with, no doubt, half the barmen in Hoxton) are pretty certain his name is Rob Banks and he’s from Bristol, meaning that it should not take Scotland Yard long to seek him out if anyone really took his subversion seriously. Banksy at first amused us with impressive stunts, from painting ‘We’re bored of fish’ in seven-foot high letters on the penguin enclosure in London Zoo, to daubing satirical images of life on the other side on the wall of the Israeli Left Bank Barrier. Now, he paints cows in the presence of RSPA inspectors and invites Jamie Oliver and Kate Moss to parties to celebrate. When he installed a telephone box in Soho, sliced in half by a pick-axe with a puddle of blood oozing from beneath it, Westminster Council may have confiscated it, but BT adopted the stunt, calling it “a stunning visual comment on BT’s transformation from an old-fashioned telecommunications company into a modern communications services provider.”

Banksy might once have been edgier than a hedgehog smoking crystal meth on a cliff-face, but now he has little more street-cred than a schoolboy getting caught feeding his tamagotchi in the back of double R.E.  Or even, an Amnesty rep working late into the night on King’s Parade with a bit of chalk. Graffiti culture poses as little a threat to Cambridge as it does to Camden Lock at the moment: a bucket of soapy water and a sponge and all will be as right as rain.

Mary Bowers

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