The rebels of the urban sprawl

Spray wild designs upon the wall.

Is it art or vulgar scrawl

Adorning our fair city?

Preferring to be out of sight

Always ready to take flight.

Imposing images at night –

Ghost painters without pity.

They're all anti-establishment.

They don't approve of government.

The nature of their art had meant

Big problems for the city.

Through their street art they would invent

The slogans of their discontent

They sprayed on walls with ill intent

That often wasn't pretty.

From rotting squats they would emerge

To give in to their graphic urge

And many people cursed the scourge

Imposed upon the city.

They all disdain the nine to five.

Their urban art keeps them alive

Though some think that their life's a skive,

And presence is a pity.

Art history's a funny thing.

What starts out as a rebel fling

Ends up in praises people sing

All over the fair city.

The blank walls wait for art to show

Now Banksy's style basks in the glow

He's Bristol's art scene's Romeo –

Mysteriously witty.

Yes this new art has got respect.

It's worth so much we must protect

It is in a space we all inspect –

The galleries of the city.

Now tourists come from far and wide.

Street art is part of Bristol pride.

We love this art we'd once deride.

So God bless Bristol City.

(This poem has been made into a film that will be showing as part of Bristol Poetry Festival.)

Trevor Carter, The Bard of Windmill Hill.

We seek him here

they seek him there,

A-listers laud him everywhere!

Is he in Kingsdown or Kingswood?

You'll not find him – as if you ever could.

Applaud the cafuddled cleverness

of half truths and mixed metaphors

enshrined in our collective psyche.

The duality of man:

not listed in scripture

or televised temples,

but revealed,

bright and alive

in a sardonic modern medium.

The good and bad

the happy and sad

suggested and checkmated

with the sanguine humour of a high priest.

Our potentates squabble

over the One Ring -

whilst from the Bat-cave you chortle.

On the hard streets there are smiles

and we cry:

Irreverence – thy name is Banksy

By Craig Stephens, by email.

● Some lines from the conga-line queue for the Banksy show:

Stuck in the Banksy queue

I need the loo

Been here four hours

The experience sours.

We wanted longer opening times

"Please open longer!" the public chimes

"How about till it's past half nine?

To see the Banksy we do pine".

Museum queue staff, they do their best

Working hard, not much rest

It's the people at the top that are the pests

You should have planned for more visiting guests!

Thousands have seen it, thousands won't

This gert big queue, it's like a moat

For longer opening hours, we'd all vote

The council's disorganisation gets my goat.

We're shuffling forward, slowly bit by bit

A few steps closer to Banksy's clever wit

Been so long queuing, can't now quit -

I just hope we can all finally fit!

Peter Sutton, Bristolian, in the queue.

● There have been many letters in the paper complaining about the queues for the Banksy exhibition at the City Museum, and many asking why the opening hours could not have been extended.

This was a blockbuster which nobody saw coming, but you can respond and plan. It was obvious from day one that this was going to be popular.

I saw the queue snaking past the university on the first Saturday and thought it was amazing, but joined it. I waited for maybe 40 minutes and got in. Now the queue is horrendous at times and you may wait for up to three hours, and still not get in.

I was told that the problem was not hiring extra staff, it is having the right trained experienced staff in place. There are health and safety issues and fire regulations, and people's safety has to be considered.

It's the senior managers who should really answer the questions and explain why the museum could not open on more evenings (even 24 hour opening), not the beleaguered front staff.

Maybe other museum staff around the country could have been seconded to help?

Jon Elbert, Banksy fan.

● Am I alone in thinking that Banksy euphoria was so misplaced? I wanted to take my granddaughter to the Bristol Museum as it was the school holidays only to be told that we would have to wait in the queue and would likely wait for around 4-5 hours. I told him that I was not interested in the Banksy exhibition but wanted to tour the museum for all the other attractions. Sorry, he said but that is not possible, you will have to queue. Brilliant, I thought, just when the time was right to take her to the Museum and I was blocked because of a graffiti "artist" and his array of "art".

I have no appreciation for graffiti at all, I think that it is a blight on our communities. Perhaps if there had been a "charitable" charge for the thousands of people who visited the exhibition of say 50p per person then the money raised could have been put towards clearing up the ever growing paint being daubed on public and private buildings, etc. around our city. If graffiti is becoming acceptable as a "work of art" then heaven help us all and the euphoria being given to Banksy will I am sure encourage a generation of "street artists" to emulate and copy what he has done! Why has he remained anonymous? Could be because if he were known he would be arrested for defacing property – just as I would be if I were to do likewise?

Sonny, Portishead, by email.

● I sympathise with "Art Lover", Clifton Wood, (BEP 26.8.09). I too, would have liked to visit the Museum (not Banksy, albeit original, witty and thought provoking) during the school holidays.

I think that this exhibition should have been arranged so as not to inconvenience the council tax payers of Bristol, who genuinely wanted to see the rest of the exhibitions in the museum.

And, not to have charged a nominal entry fee was ludicrous. Think how many hard-up local charities could have benefited from this! I am sure that if the charities were not lucky then the monies could have gone to the poor Bristolians who have had their properties defaced with GRAFFITI!

S Loader, Bedminster Down.

● So donations at the City Museum & Art Gallery are four times the usual annual amount, at £45,000 (Saturday's front page).

Great, you might think – but how many times the usual visitors have there been? Ten, fifteen times?

If one third of the 300,000 visitors were adults, that means people are giving an average of just 22.5p.

Wow, that's really generous, eh! It suggests that we don't really want to fork out for fancy art. We'll take it if we think it's free, but if course it's not – taxpayers have paid for the extra staff and security.

The museum could have done a lot more to encourage donations – donation boxes were obscure, there was nothing on the leaflet saying, "the exhibition is free but we really appreciate your support".

If the museum had offered just one – only one! – evening entry for a £20 donation to the Friends of the Museum charity, they could have raised £12,000 before costs.

It has been a wasted fund-raising opportunity.

Doug Henderson, By email.

Editor's note: The £45,000 raised was four times the ANNUAL amount (roughly £11,000). This means that during the Banksy exhibition, which went on for three months, the museum raised 16 times more than normal.

● People were so keen to see the Banksy exhibition that they travelled from far and wide and queued for up to four hours. They were so impressed that they donated an average 15p each as a thank-you.

What a load of cheapskates!

Graham Best, Almondsbury, Bristol.

● Like many others, I too was not able to get to see the Banksy exhibition at Bristol Museum because I was out at work and the weekend queue was horrific.

Why could there not have been more late night openings for people? I just don't get it.

Ben Hibble, Bedminster.

● Two of your correspondents in the Open Lines "Banksy Special" rightly condemn the £30 million wasted on the "Museum of Bristol", pointing out that nobody outside Planet Council asked for it.

However, it's worse than that.

Many people, myself included, pleaded for the retention of the excellent Bristol Industrial Museum. Waste of effort; the council wanted the new glossy, interactive, trivial MoB, and that's what we'll get – and pay for.

John Michael Rogers, by email.

● Bristol City Council claims (front page article, Tuesday 1 September) that the "Banksy Effect" has put £10m into the city's economy, but does not give the actual evidence and proof for this claim.

Nobody can doubt that the Banksy exhibition has boosted spending from visitors to some degree but nobody will know by how much until a serious analysis is done, which has not yet been carried out or published.

Maybe the council is simply plucking figures from the air to create a "feelgood" factor and be associated with the credit?

Banksy's work is in part about how power abuses its position and how politicians lie to us – so you see a policeman in riot gear on a rocking horse, and chimpanzees in the voting chamber.

Let's not allow our existing power structures to get away with misleading and deceiving us!

Banksy would hate that.

We can't trust those in power; that's one of the deeper messages of the show for me. If we get more democracy, greater accountability, and more openness from those in power, there will be a real and lasting benefit far greater than £10m.

Matt Baker, Henleaze.

● I was very surprised to read about the £30m cost of the new Museum of Bristol in the letters pages today (by Sarah Martin).

If it's costing that much, you wonder why we need it. Surely there are more important things to be spending £30m on, like improving schools, care for the elderly, helping the poorest and most disadvantaged in Bristol. We've just had a brilliantly successful free show so why do we need to shell out so much when we have a very good and very popular Bristol Museum already?

K Denby, Southville.

● I'm confused: why are we spending council taxes on building a new museum down by the waterside when we have such a great one up the hill? Wouldn't it be best to spend museum budgets on getting more brilliant exhibitions to the existing museum? OK they won't be as great as Banksy, they can't be, but we could have a first-rate programme of special exhibits.

Maybe we should be offering some special artists studios somewhere or a special art school of graffiti to train new artists and then Banksy would come back and do another show for us in return.

That's what I'd spend the money on. It would cost less too.

Harry Trimble, St Werburgh's.

● Thank you Evening Post for giving us a chance to vote for our favourite Banksy piece.

Could authorities like the city council, public agencies and quangos now follow this lead and apply this principle themselves?

They could give us, the people, more chance to have a direct say in things which affect us. Too many bureaucracies get caught up in their own "groupthink" and end up serving their own ends, not ours.

Let's give more real power to the people – the power of choice.

Mel Taylor, Long Ashton.

● The Banksy exhibition has put Bristol on the map both nationally and internationally – and with huge tourism and commercial benefits. It is also clear that an opportunity was missed to generate even more visitors and revenue.

The appeal has been to all generations. Therefore, with Banksy's bold Bristolian backing, surely a perfect opportunity presents itself to establish a modern identity to rank alongside the maritime and engineering history, from the days when Bristol was truly the Second City. When the new Museum of Bristol opens in 2011, a dedicated space should house a permanent (but ever-changing) Banksy exhibition.

If the plans for new stadia for Bristol Rovers, Bristol City and Gloucestershire CCC come to fruition, Bristol will be able to draw in many more international visitors. That would just leave an international quality concert arena, athletics and hockey stadia and swimming complex, then Bristol really would be world-renowned.

Nick Baldwin, Abbots Leigh.

● Pat on the back of Bristol City Council for putting on the free Banksy exhibition at Bristol Museum and boosting the local economy to the tune of £10 million.

Next time, how about holding it at the Public Hall in Shirehampton and giving our local economy a similar boost.

Leon Franklin, Shirehampton.