Street Art Map: 20 Maps of Banksy, Space Invaders and Murals

Street art does not last, and the people who map it keep the dead as carefully as the living. A Banksy map files 73 of its 103 works under “lost”, a Space Invader hunter in Paris marks 172 mosaics destroyed, a Rostov map keeps a “necropolis of street art” and a Los Angeles mural map has pieces that “exist in memory only”. Others log what is still out there with a collector’s patience: 300 tiny ghosts on one campus, 33 Pac-Men in Curitiba, a Belfast gable repainted again and again since 1981.

1. Banksy Map UK: 73 Lost Works and 23 Still on the Wall

   In Peckham, Banksy added three drones to a Stop sign on 22 December 2023, and it was stolen within 30 minutes. This map of 103 sites keeps a status line for each, and most of them read like an obituary: 73 works sit in a layer of lost artworks, 23 are still visible, often behind perspex fogged by condensation, and 7 mark his past shows, from Turf War in 2003, three days in a warehouse on Kingsland Road with live painted animals, to Dismaland. The Graffiti Removal Hotline in West Kensington was “painted over - in black!”, a cat in Cricklewood was taken down by the billboard owner on the day it was revealed, and the dated updates along the Camden canal follow a feud: Team Robbo rewrites “I don’t Believe In Global Warming” to “I don’t believe in war. To (sic) late for that Sonny.”

   

   Objects

   103103 points

   Countries

   United Kingdom

   Made with

   Google My Maps

2. Space Invader Map Paris: One Hunter's 1,474 Mosaics

   PA_0493 at 87 rue Saint-Honoré is “impossible à flasher”, the eyes point the wrong way. To flash an Invader is to photograph it in the artist’s own game app, and this map is Sabinou’s score sheet: 320 mosaics flashed, 982 still to get and 172 destroyed, each with its code, address and condition. Most are simply “OK”, others “dégradé” or “très dégradé”, and some need tactics: PA_1486 on the Quai des Carrières in Charenton has to be flashed from the Tony Parker gymnasium, PA_0613 hides behind a cable tray at a tunnel entrance. At PA_0087 on the steps of the Port de la Gare the hunter is left with “OK pas vu ??? Détruit ?”.

   

   Objects

   1,4741,474 points

   Countries

   France

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

   Versions

   1 other version

3. Belfast Murals Map: Four Decades of Repainted Gables

   On the corner of Jasmine Way and Gardenmore Road in Twinbrook, “Bobby Sands MP Support The Hunger Strike” went up in 1981, a Sands memorial by GK followed in 1987, then versions with crests and with mourners. This map of Northern Ireland’s walls stacks every work painted on a spot into one entry, numbered Work#1, Work#2, with year, painter and the references of the photo collections that recorded it, Peter Moloney’s, Seosamh Mac Coille’s and Paddy Duffy’s. Its 6,290 points run from Twinbrook and the Falls Road to Derry and from Strabane to Bangor, and include “Victory To Argentina” from 1982, its exact place now unknown. A layer of 554 for the city centre is marked “Street Art!”, where Visual Waste paints flowers, KMG a selkie and MWAK a “Scundered Crab” instead of slogans.

   

   Objects

   6,2906,238 points, 40 lines, 12 areas

   Countries

   United KingdomIreland

   Made with

   Google My Maps

4. Graffiti Ghost Map: 300 Tiny Ghosts on One Campus

   Number 1 was found at Burrill Hall on 13 September; by the end someone had logged more than 300 of the little graffiti ghosts that Zhero leaves around the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Each gets a number and a type in a taxonomy of its own: solid white, solid black, lined on garbage bins, lined on electrical boxes, lined small, and “special” for the odd ones. The names do the rest: an “upside down white ghost near the transit center”, a “tunnel ghost with horns”, the “ceramics building wiggly ghost”, “many many ghosts on a dumpster” and “a million ghosts on a pole” in a parking lot on East Healey. A second layer sets eight stops of a scavenger hunt.

   

   Objects

   308308 points

   Countries

   United States

   Made with

   Google My Maps

5. Vienna Graffiti Map: 4,006 Walls Along Streets and Rails

   Vienna’s graffiti archive Spraycity ties its photo gallery to the city in 4,006 entries, nearly every one a thumbnail and a PHOTOS link. Most follow the streets district by district (2,479), but 502 run along the rails, one layer per S-Bahn line from the S1 Nordbahn to the S80 and the U-Bahn, where trackside walls are mapped as lines. The Donaukanal gets 314 entries of its own, 354 murals are listed apart, some with only “Photos on request”, and 102 halls of fame include the Wienerwand legal walls at Arne Carlsson Park, at Flex on the canal and under the back of the Nordbrücke. One hall has an epitaph instead: “Kabelwerk (R.I.P.)”.

   

   Objects

   4,0063,121 points, 761 lines, 124 areas

   Countries

   Austria

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

6. Ghost Sign Map: Faded Painted Ads Lit Up Again

   Light Capsule 000 was Omaha, “Day 6 from Projecting West”, and it inspired the whole project: projecting light onto faded painted advertisements so the old lettering shows again. The map numbers 43 completed capsules, among them Smithers & Co and Babcock Hatters in Butte, Orange Crush in Great Falls, five signs in Winnipeg and a week of London signs in September. The 102 potential ones read like a projectionist’s notebook: “Hard to hit with trees”, “Viewable from Parking Garage”, “Tagged up”, “Painted over”, “Ultra Short Throw and Generator”. A Knoxville lead comes “via Walter Groff (Sign Painter) grandfather painted in the area, Orange Crush signs”, and 53 more candidates wait in New York.

   

   Objects

   212212 points

   Countries

   United StatesUnited KingdomCanadaand 1 more

   Made with

   Google My Maps

7. Banksy New York Map: Better Out Than In, Day by Day

   For October 2013, Banksy’s month-long residency in New York, this map puts one point on each day. October 4 gets three, the Playground Mob, Dirty Underwear and Occupy! musicals in Delancey, Bushwick and Williamsburg; October 5 is a delivery truck from Mott Street carrying a mobile waterfall through the city; October 11 the animatronic Sirens of the Lambs, rumbling out of the Meatpacking District. “Waiting in vain… at The Hustler Club” lands in Hell’s Kitchen, “The banality of the banality of evil. Oil on oil on canvas, 2013” on East 23rd Street. October 23 has only one line: “Cancelled due to police activity.”

   

   Objects

   3333 points

   Countries

   United States

   Made with

   Google My Maps

8. Rostov Graffiti Map: Murals, Soviet Signs and a Necropolis

   The “Есть букет” graffiti on Khalturinsky Lane is marked ЗАКРАШЕНО, painted over, and the bus stop at Roshcha in Aleksandrovka was torn down along with its graffiti: both lie in this map’s “necropolis of street art”. The living works, 499 of them in Rostov Oblast, come as small records of artist, town, district and address, sometimes with the artist’s own words, and a teddy bear on Truzhenikov Street, a local resident claims, is ten years old: “I remember, in the evening it wasn’t there, and in the morning it appeared.” Other layers list 68 Soviet shop signs such as “Волна”, up since 1975, grey walls proposed for painting with their length in metres, and 47 drug-advertising graffiti with the dates they were found and painted out.

   

   Objects

   2,3482,318 points, 8 lines, 22 areas

   Countries

   Russian FederationKazakhstan

   Made with

   Google My Maps

9. Millo Murals Map: An Artist's Own 150 Walls Worldwide

   “Not everyday you get the chance to paint again in the same place, imagine on the same wall,” the Italian muralist Millo writes of going back to Turin ten years later. This is his own map, 150 murals sorted by year from 2011 to 2024, each told in the first person. In La Paz he painted the mausoleum of the bus drivers in the general cemetery, where people bring skulls for the Fiesta de las Ñatitas; at Stavanger airport he turned the baggage belt into a mural; in Helsingborg he repainted a station wall after half of his 2018 work vanished under a new air-conditioning system. In Gallipoli the title is in Griko, the Greek dialect spoken near his home town.

   

   Objects

   150150 points

   Countries

   ItalyChinaCyprusand 38 more

   Made with

   Google My Maps

10. Pac-Man Graffiti Map: Curitiba's 33 Hidden Pac-Men

    Pacman 1 is the “first record, a test, and of many”, logged on 29 October 2023, and the hunt across Curitiba ran to number 33 by January. The notes are a running chat: number 3 is also a Pokéstop, number 17 comes “after a Habib’s”, number 27 is best seen from the left side of the anticlockwise Interbairros II bus. Readers of r/curitiba sent in finds, and number 18, near the São José Trabalhador church, was confirmed with a second photo by u/pepeogato. Number 30 was confirmed in March 2024, and in April the building was demolished.

    

    Objects

    3333 points

    Countries

    Brazil

    Made with

    Google My Maps

11. Sardinia Murals Map: 2,706 Walls From Orgosolo to Cagliari

    Francesco Del Casino appears 157 times on this map, among them “Banditi a Orgosolo” in the mountain village famous for its murals. The 2,706 entries cover the whole island, 1,086 in central Sardinia, 905 in the south, and in Cagliari quarter by quarter, from the C.E.P. estate in Pirri to the Galleria del Sale, where Crisa, Andrea Casciu and Ericailcane painted “Animals” together. Each work carries its artist and links to interviews, and honesty about the rest: 740 entries say the artist is unknown. A mural of Emilio Lussu by Pinuccio Sciola from 1976 is listed as remade by Massimo Congiu in 2016, and two works by Manu Invisible are at the National Archaeological Museum of Cagliari.

    

    Objects

    2,7062,706 points

    Countries

    Italy

    Made with

    Google My Maps

12. Graffiti Removal Map: One Day of Cleaning Shibuya, 2014

    On 19 October 2014 someone mapped the graffiti to be cleaned off in Maruyamacho, Shibuya’s love-hotel quarter, and the 100 points show where tags really land: 26 utility poles, vending machines, distribution boards, air-conditioning units, a gas water heater beside Hotel Sleeping Beauty and the neighbourhood association’s notice boards. Each spot is named by the business it belongs to, a shutter at Shibuya Shōmei, the back of the Dixie Inn, the parking lot in front of Hotel Lutecia. Two by the police box are marked “unapproved”, some lie “outside the area”, and one point is simply illegally dumped rubbish behind Hotel Beat Wave.

    

    Objects

    10099 points, 1 line

    Countries

    Japan

    Made with

    Google My Maps

13. London Ghost Signs Map: 1,238 Faded Painted Ads

    “For your throat’s sake smoke Craven ‘A’. The world’s premier cork-tipped cigarette.” This map copies out the wording of London’s faded painted ads, starting with the 271 numbered signs of the book Ghost Signs: A London Story. Alf the Purse King, leather goods, is “also at 8 Kimberley Terrace, Gt Yarmouth”; Gardiner’s Drapery Stores has a mourning warehouse; a station notice still forbids “the movement of barrows across the booking hall floor”, and an air raid shelter sign promises room for 700. Separate layers keep the 16 book signs and 78 others that have disappeared, and a Thames Iron Works sign is flagged as a fake.

    

    Objects

    1,2381,191 points, 14 lines, 33 areas

    Countries

    United Kingdom

    Made with

    Google My Maps

14. Mexico City Murals Map: 1,039 Walls of Iztapalapa

    Josefa Ubaldo Granados lived 109 years, fought beside Emiliano Zapata in the Revolution and helped found the Barrio de San Lucas; a mural in Iztapalapa shows her holding her grandson. This map of the borough’s public murals is dominated by the 938 of “Caminos: Mujeres Libres y Seguras”, paths for women, most of them painted in 2020 and 2021 and given an artist and often a story: chinampa flower sellers, a woman in a rebozo, the pilots of Escuadrón 201. Another 97 follow Cablebús Line 2, some of them on rooftops, among them the 25-metre “Ni Una Menos”.

    

    Objects

    1,0391,025 points, 1 line, 13 areas

    Countries

    Mexico

    Made with

    Google My Maps

15. Space Invader Djerba Map: 58 Mosaics, Some Only Guessed

    Space Invader codes his mosaics by city, and Djerba’s run from DJBA_01 to DJBA_58. Marcop92 has pinned all of them on the Tunisian island, and is open about which are guesses: ten are marked “hypothèse”. DJBA_55 gets three candidate positions written into the note, “33,809899 ; 10,960622 ? ou 33,8032573102767 ; 10,9680891036987 ?”, a puzzle still being worked on.

    

    Objects

    5858 points

    Countries

    Tunisia

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

16. Brussels Comic Murals Map: Tintin, Gaston and 60 More

    Gil Jourdan appears three times on this map of Brussels comic-strip walls, once on a mural for the character’s 50th anniversary in Auderghem, once against the police station. The 62 points give each mural its artist and street: Edgar P. Jacobs’s La Marque Jaune in the Rue du Houblon, Morris’s Lucky Luke, Hergé’s Quick et Flupke in the Rue Haute, Geluck’s cat “high up” on the Boulevard du Midi after the railway bridge. Tintin rides a locomotive inside the Gare du Midi, unveiled on 10 January 2007, and of the Poje mural on the Rue de l’Ecuyer the note admits it “was bigger before”.

    

    Objects

    6262 points

    Countries

    Belgium

    Made with

    Google My Maps

17. San Francisco Street Art Map: Banksy Rats and Gone Pieces

    Eight Banksys anchor this San Francisco map, from “This’ll Look Good When It’s Framed Boy” at 853 Valencia Street to a “Peace Rat promotes Zipcar” and a “Star Struck Rat in Glitter”. The rest is the Mission and Oakland of its day: Os Gêmeos on 22nd Street, Hugh Leeman and Eddie Colla wheatpastes in Linden Alley, Dan Fontes’s zebras under an Oakland overpass, Clarion Alley (“Street View this section and check out the murals that were there when Google drove by”). Chris Lux’s garage mural was tagged over by KKKatie, a Stickman on Haight is “very small, you have to look hard”, and for the Berwick archways the author asks anyone who knows the artists to write in.

    

    Objects

    5047 points, 3 lines

    Countries

    United States

    Made with

    Google My Maps

18. Los Angeles Murals Map: 229 Walls and Six in Memory Only

    David Flores’s Nelson Mandela is in a McDonald’s parking lot: “Good news is you will find parking. Bad news is you won’t be able to leave without a McFlurry!” This map of 229 Los Angeles murals is written like advice from a friend. UniWolfCheetah is “only here when the restaurant ‘Wolf’ is closed”, MuckRock’s Snake Charmer is down the alley south of the Ross parking lot, and Welcome to Westchester, five storeys, took David Russell nearly three months. Where the author found a peacock and Google Maps showed something else, both photos went in. A layer of six “retired art” keeps the walls that “exist in memory only”.

    

    Objects

    235235 points

    Countries

    United States

    Made with

    Google My Maps

19. Cochabamba Murals Map: Bolivia's Street Art Biennial

    The art centre mARTadero maps every edition of the Bienal de Arte Urbano in Cochabamba, one layer per biennial from BAU11 to BAU23, with the artists and corners: Bastardilla at Heroínas and General Acha, Oveja 213 on Calle Bolívar, murals on the Cobija and Cala Cala bridges. For +BAU21 the older walls got a second life in augmented reality, animated murals by El Marsh from 2015 and by Joaquín Cuevas and Patricia Aramayo from 2013, mosaics of women in the Pasaje San Rafael, and Jorit’s “Agua Santa”, his 2017 portrait of Domitila.

    

    Objects

    158158 points

    Countries

    Bolivia

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

20. Berlin Street Art Map: 3,220 Murals, Boxes and Halls of Fame

    The biggest layer of this Berlin map is not murals but electricity boxes, 989 of them. Every one of the 3,220 points links to a reportage on Vagabundler and sorts the city by the writer’s own categories: 474 “mighty murals”, 522 works of “complex craft”, 171 “golden nuggets”, 89 train stations and tracks, and 34 halls of fame and hot spots, among them the old pyrotechnics factory in Malchow. Nineteen urbex sites close the list, some already gone, like Revaler 29, where the “wall got turn down”.

    

    Objects

    3,2203,220 points

    Countries

    Germany

    Made with

    Google My Maps