Banksy is an anonymous British street artist who came out of the Bristol graffiti scene in the 1990s and became the most famous unnamed artist in the world. His stenciled rats, kissing policemen and girl with a red balloon turn up on walls without warning, and in 2018 one of his canvases shredded itself the moment it was sold. A name has been in print since 2008. He has never confirmed it.
Everything the world knows about him is something he chose to show. The one thing he never showed is the one thing people type into Google.
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The name is not new. In 2008 a British newspaper printed one, Robin Gunningham, a Bristol man born in 1973. In 2016 researchers at Queen Mary University of London fed the locations of 140 works in London and Bristol into the kind of software police use to find where a serial offender lives.
The hot spots, a pub, a playing field and several addresses, matched places Gunningham had lived in or visited. One of the authors told the BBC he would be surprised if it were not him. Banksy's team never confirmed it, the walls kept appearing, and the prices kept climbing.
Then, in March 2026, Reuters published the result of four years of reporting. Its best evidence was a handwritten confession from September 2000, when New York police arrested a man at 4:20 in the morning for altering a Marc Jacobs billboard. The confession carries the name Robin Gunningham.
Reuters added border records from late October 2022, the days when Banksy's murals appeared around Kyiv, which it matched to Gunningham through a later change of name. Banksy's lawyer replied that many of the details were wrong and that exposure would put his client in danger. Banksy himself said nothing. At the end of April he put a statue on a plinth in central London.
What You'll Discover
Where he hid from the police.
How a fake cave painting got hung.
What became of Dismaland's timber.
What the shredder got wrong.
Why a card company beat him in court.
What he put on a London plinth.