Graffiti all over the Royal Wedding

The Royal Wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle celebrated on 19^th May, brought a lot of attention to Windsor, a small town situated 34 km to the west of London. The historic town is known to be the place of one of the official residences of the British Royal Family, therefore it has always been a protected area.

Prior to the historic wedding, someone started to spray-paint the word ‘fork’ all over the place. The silver graffiti was found on road signs and in nearly 150 other walls across Windsor, where the royal coach travelled on the wedding day. There was even an Instagram page where all the tags were posted, but has since been deleted.

The police of Thames Valley started an investigation and were desperate to find the person or the group of vandals behind the graffiti. A spokesperson from the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead said, “This graffiti has become a thorough nuisance and we are working hard with people to ensure our borough is clean and pleasant for the wedding”.

Police and people from the Windsor Castle made sure that the tag was not painted on the walls of the Castle before the wedding, otherwise it would have been a disaster. Locals were shocked and expressed their dissappointment for the offender.

The wedding was watched by millions of people around the world so the attempt to gain attention by the artist is notorious. Even though, it is not clear the meaning of the tag nor the motives other than to call the attention of millions of people.

The graffiti removal of this kind of tag has to be done promptly in order to avoid more occurrences, in this case, the amount of tags increased at a fast pace reaching more than 150, which speaks volumes about the importance of removing the unwanted graffiti as soon as possible. Often, it is unclear what is the meaning of a tag like this, but in other cases in which it is an obvious offence, it becomes even more important to remove graffiti quickly.

Whether the royal graffiti was intended to be offensive or just to call attention, it is an offence to public property and should not be considered as street art.