The Personal Blog of Dr Banksy*.

Second week of the course. We visited Bristol on Tuesday and went drawing around the M Shed docks. I'd been there before, so it wasn't a total breath of fresh air, but I did get some good work done. We were lucky enough to spot the Matthew, a ship which I have always wanted to draw because of my interest in 17th-19th century vessels (like the Victory , which I have also visited down in Portsmouth ). In each of the studies I created, I wanted to give a sense of age whilst keeping an industrial feel to suggest the strength that the objects I drew once had in their everyday use (particularly the cranes around the M Shed). To do this, I chose, in accordance with the brief, to work mainly in black and white, which gave my drawings a foggy, smoky feel. However, in order to show that there was still some life (and indeed a lot of history) in these objects, I employed the same method as with Birnbeck Pier, injecting sparse amounts of bright colour into the pieces (all present in real ...

Alright -  Dismaland is in full swing and still at the peak of its ticket sales and media popularity. But...  why did all that hard work have to be done to the Tropicana when there are plenty of other purpose-abandoned, crumbling ruins along W-s-M seafront? The Birnbeck Pier is situated about ten minutes' walk from the luckier Grand Pier, to the north. It was opened on 5th July 1867 and was eventually closed for business in 1994 (though the final official excursion was in 1979). In its heyday, Birnbeck was an extremely popular tourist attraction with hundreds upon hundreds of visitors each year - some of which never actually left the pier and its attached "island".  It also boasted a number of attractions including a carousel, a licensed bar (putting newsagents everywhere to shame) and a  shooting gallery (why don't piers have those nowadays? I wonder). It was even used secretly by the Admiralty as HMS Birnbeck in 1941, and was involved in the testing of the infam...