buygones

Tucked inconspicuously between London’s Swiss Cottage Library and Swimming Pool (one of them was designed by the famous modernist architect Basil Spence but I can’t remember which one, which is probably because there is not much difference between a Sir Basil Spence masterpiece and any old piece of post war local government municipal crap) is a giant turd-like bronze scupture of Sigmund Freud, who lived up the road. On the wall behind it, someone once sprayed ‘WANKER’ in massive letters. It worked on so many levels. Pure genious.

In the late 70s the Northwick Park roundabout in the North London suburb of Harrow, was plastered with a slogan which was sprayed with the same slap dashness of an ‘I woz ere’ graffito but was in fact a sublime mashup of Marx quotation and pop culture reference. It stood there for years, a monument to suburbia. “Nicholas Parsons is the Neo Opiate of the People” (Nicholas Parson’s being a contemporary Television Game Show host and partial model for Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge) I ever become a gazillionaire I would like to buy the Northwick Park roundabout, respray it with the slogan and dedicate the place to the unknown Graffiti hero.