The Long, Forgotten History of Graffiti in England

From the Romans to Banksy

“Virtually all our sites have some form of graffiti,” says English Heritage historian Andrew Hann, "you go round any historic site, particularly a ruined one, and you’ll discover graffiti everywhere. Some of it’s modern, written by trespassers who’ve just come on the site and scratched their names on the walls, while other graffiti is actually quite historic.”

We tend to think of graffiti as part of contemporary, urban street culture – made famous by figures like Banksy – but do you know where the word actually comes from? It was coined way back in 1851 and was used to describe something much, much older than that. 'Graffiti' and its singular form 'graffito' come from the Italian 'graffiato' meaning 'scratched'. The term was used by archaeologists to describe the ancient inscriptions they found carved on the walls in the ruins of Pompeii. Some of the oldest examples were the most simple, and a form that you still see on bus stops everywhere today: “Gaius was here.” This perfectly demonstrates what so much graffiti is really about: ordinary people, across history, making their mark on the world around them.

At Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, “a couple of doors were discovered in one of the garden buildings covered in graffiti scrawled by many generations of gardeners. Little quotations and sometimes just names and dates saying when they were serving in the gardens”.

“There are some interesting pieces at Bolsover Castle, which some people think are witch marks. Other people think it's probably more likely to be masons' marks, but we don't know for sure.”

The examples span the country, from Carlisle, to Dover, to Belsay, and time, with examples ranging from hundreds of years old to the present day.

Some of the graffiti examples are very artistic. In a small room just off of Virginia Courtauld’s boudoir at Eltham Palace, there’s a little room called the ‘map room’; “we were told that this was where Virginia and her secretary used to plan their trips abroad, sailing off in their yacht around the world. We expected to find a map in there, or a map or two, but it had all been painted over by the army that occupied the site later. When we peeled the paint off, little by little with a scalpel, we discovered not only one map, but about eight or nine maps, and around them had been painted a little mural of lots of sort of little caricatures of features linked to the maps. So next to China there was a dragon and a pagoda, next to Ireland a shamrock, and next to the map of England there was a Union Jack flag. There was this amazing series of little watercolor sketches. We really didn't expect that at all.”

Often graffiti was scratched onto the walls by people kept there against their will. At Portchester Castle, “where prisoners of war were kept during the Napoleonic wars, the prisoners there scratched little drawings of boats onto the walls of their prison cells. And then there’s Richmond Castle where there's a prison where conscientious objectors during the First World War were kept, and they left some amazing graffiti scratched onto the walls with charcoal and pencil lead.”