In case it's not clear from the story: a big part of the expense here is that the mural was painted onto the Royal Courts of Justice building, which is a Grade I preserved building, putting it in the same tier of building preservation as the Tower of London and the Palace of Westminster. Some of the things you'd do to get graffiti off a subway tunnel wall or a brutalist municipal building in the US (like using a high-powered pressure washer) can't be done to the RCJ building without risking damage to the structure.
>the mural was painted onto the Royal Courts of Justice building, which is a Grade I preserved building, putting it in the same tier of building preservation as the Tower of London and the Palace of Westminster.
The section in question is not a Grade I preserved building, it's Grade II, which is a significantly less stringent standard. That building is in fact a quasi-brutalist tower built in 1968[0], adjacent to a much older building.
Ironically, in that picture you can see that the wall just above the mural was already badly defaced by the installation and removal of security cameras during several decades.
The scars and drilled holes from old, removed cameras and wiring are still plainly visible. Contrary to its rapid reaction to the mural, the government has made no attempt to repair this self-inflicted damage, which calls into question the whole argument about protecting the building
(You can verify that the damage has been there for decades, by looking at older Google Streetview pictures back to 2008).
Comments
In case it's not clear from the story: a big part of the expense here is that the mural was painted onto the Royal Courts of Justice building, which is a Grade I preserved building, putting it in the same tier of building preservation as the Tower of London and the Palace of Westminster. Some of the things you'd do to get graffiti off a subway tunnel wall or a brutalist municipal building in the US (like using a high-powered pressure washer) can't be done to the RCJ building without risking damage to the structure.
>the mural was painted onto the Royal Courts of Justice building, which is a Grade I preserved building, putting it in the same tier of building preservation as the Tower of London and the Palace of Westminster.
The section in question is not a Grade I preserved building, it's Grade II, which is a significantly less stringent standard. That building is in fact a quasi-brutalist tower built in 1968[0], adjacent to a much older building.
The site of the mural is visible here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/Queen%27...
Ironically, in that picture you can see that the wall just above the mural was already badly defaced by the installation and removal of security cameras during several decades.
The scars and drilled holes from old, removed cameras and wiring are still plainly visible. Contrary to its rapid reaction to the mural, the government has made no attempt to repair this self-inflicted damage, which calls into question the whole argument about protecting the building
(You can verify that the damage has been there for decades, by looking at older Google Streetview pictures back to 2008).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Courts_of_Justice_(Banks...