Banksy's Dismaland, the Miserable Kingdom

By N.P.

IN EDWARDIAN times Weston-Super-Mare’s beach was as full of holiday-makers as Benidorm, the Spanish coastal resort where the Easyjet-set go to get sun. Today a lone child kicks sand under overcast skies. “Ice cold refreshing slush”, reads a board on the beach, offering a weather forecast along with soft drinks. Not for nothing is this patch of England called Somerset. The little big-wheel rotates in the wind with nobody in it. Even the sea seems to have fled the resort, retreating at low tide beyond the horizon. The loudest voices are the caws of the gulls.

Fish-and-chip shops are boarded up, along with a paint-peeling toy shop. “Gifts 4 All, 7 days a week,” sighs its rotten sign. The largest store on the high-street is a £1 shop, contending for custom with its nearby rival, “99p”. UKIP, an anti-immigrant party, is the only political party with any visible high-street presence. (The tacky £ in its logo resembles another pound-shop.) “Please refrain from washing your feet in these facilities,” a notice sneers at Muslims in the public urinal. For nostalgia’s sake, pensioners are the main visitors, down for the day from Birmingham with their blankets and thermos flasks. The most dedicated come here to die.

Into this wasteland, Banksy, a local street-artist who spent his childhood holidaying in Weston, has built a theme park honouring the decay. The derelict Lido, once famed for its art-deco diving boards, has been relabelled Dismaland, in the Gothic font used by Disneyland, albeit in mouldy black. The enchanted technicolour castle is recast as a dirt-strewn, tumble-down wreck. Inside, Cinderella-cum-Princess-Di hangs head-down from her carriage-window after a crash, while paparazzi with strobes flash the accident-scene. Elsewhere, the grim-reaper dances on a dodgem. Children fish for plastic ducks—in an oil slick—and race with model boats on choppy waters bearing cargoes of dirty refugees (standing room only), their faces as listless as any waiting in line for slaughter. “A different kind of family day out,” writes Banksy, whose actual identity remains a mystery, in his fairground brochure. “The fairytale is over, the world is sleepwalking towards climate catastrophe, maybe all that escapism will have to wait.”

A prouder town might have reeled at the insult. But Weston’s buzzes are too rare for its townsfolk to be quite so cavalier. Not since its pier burnt down in 2008 has the beachfront witnessed such crowds. “We only see queues on dole day,” chirps one. “It took me 45 minutes to drive home along the beachfront,” chimes another. “We sold a thousand pounds' worth of cables in a week,” counts the owner of a local hardware store. Even Weston’s chief executive, Mike Jackson, whose previous attempts at promotion revolved around beach buggy races, revels in the fame his town has attracted since being dubbed Dismaland. “Our global profile—we never had anything like it,” he beams, listing the Hollywood stars who graced the opening night. “Maybe Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Madonna too.”

The galleries continue the theme of a world akilter. A smiley face rotates in the darkness; cut loose from their moorings, its eyes and mouth form mutant scowls. Children warm their hands against a radioactive glow at their feet. Many works come from the Middle East, a corner of the globe which gave birth to civilisation and now seems to be burying it. Gustav Klimt’s kiss is projected onto a Syrian wall, punctured by artillery shells. The police and their tools of surveillance are omnipresent, a lurking reminder of the force required to keep fractured societies in check. One room is occupied by a model suburb in darkness after a riot. The only colour is that of police cars flashing blue. The Lido’s grand fountain is reborn as the spout of a police van’s water-cannon.

Quite why the portrait of social collapse should appeal is unclear. Many installations are reassuringly futuristic. There’s a certain schadenfreude in wondering how future generations will cope when juggernauts and pipelines are upended. Others, though, hold a mirror to the present, offering a disquieting reminder of how close our world has coming to spinning out of joint. They highlight the widening gap between the ruled on one side and the rulers, their henchmen, the police, and courtiers who relay their message, the mainstream media, and peddle their hierarchical fantasies like Disney. It is beguilingly told—with the panache of a Disney hobgoblin. “Rich people paying rich people to tell middle class people to blame poor people,” is how a graffiti artist defines “News”. After an hour or two, Dismaland’s visitors feel so subversive they would feel comfortable voting for Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left contender for leader of Britain’s parliamentary opposition.

But above all Dismaland appeals because it remains a fun “family day out”. For all his protests, Banksy is a showbizman. The night this correspondent visited, the organisers were laughingly dispensing unlimited quantities of prosecco, strangely unaware of their resemblance to the portrait above them of Prime Minister David Cameron, sipping white wine insouciantly while the curtain is drawn on old Blighty. Fireworks lit up the dark. Hollywood stars joined in the frivolity. Dandily dressed salespeople circulated with price-lists of objets-d'art, and Banksy has auctioned his work elsewhere for hundreds of thousands of pounds. In 21st century Britain, even anarchists have joined the champagne society.