The public has had a love/hate relationship with graffiti. On the “good press” side, talented graffiti artists such as Banksy have made graffiti an aesthetic pleasure, utilising stencils to produce difficult graphics loaded with a subtle meaning attached. This kind of graffiti was likely to get trendy with both the masses and the art critics : visually pleasing and intellectually satisfying. This sort of graffiti is even bought as graffiti printed onto canvas, and placed in middle class households and office reception areas.

Nevertheless, when it comes to your down and dirty graffiti – the scally, the tagger, the gangbanger kind – this is just seen as vandalism, an offence committed by the untalented. But is graffiti only an artform? To many people, it’s not just an artform, but a method to put your stamp on a district, or even two fingers up at society : anti-establishment, anti-social, even anti-art.

Graffiti has forever been a clandestine pursuit, although the results are very much public. The intended audience is often unbeknown. Is it for a rival gang? A message to a single person? To the public at large? Or….perhaps it’s merely gratuitous and out of nothing else to do.

Whatever the causes may be, there seems to be a enduring need to spray graffiti. Some towns have acknowledged that graffiti isn’t a short-term craze, so they’ve designated areas where graffiti is permitted – usually uninhabited areas, but now and then busier areas like temporary boarding surrounding urban construction sites.