Most London Blue Badge Tourist Guides have had clients who want to get a snap of themselves by a red London phone box, often with Big Ben in the background. It is almost a rite of passage for a visitor to London and so the red boxes at the end of Whitehall often have long queues of people waiting outside for the chance to take a picture of themselves. The phone booths are rarely put to their original use – namely, to make phone calls. Now, of course, the mobile phone reigns supreme and most people have a smartphone in their pocket.

Few people are as passionate about the Battersea area of London than muralist Brian Barnes MBE, who for the last forty-five years has been leaving his artistic touch on derelict industrial carcasses and council housing estates, some in plain sight and others in the most inconspicuous of locations. He first gained recognition in 1976 with his 267 foot long mural: Battersea: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, on Battersea Bridge Road, which depicted a brush sweeping away the industrial dilapidation along Battersea’s riverfront, and replacing it with a colourful utopian vision of social prosperity for the local community.