The main attraction in Vauxhall is a building you cannot enter. Vauxhall Cross is the headquarters of the Special Intelligence Services (formerly MI6) and the employer of Britain’s most famous fictional secret agent, James Bond, often referred to simply by the number 007. The double 00 prefix indicates that Bond has a ‘licence to kill’, an invention of his creator Ian Fleming who worked for Naval Intelligence during the Second World War when the double 0 symbol indicated that a document was classified as ‘top secret.’

David Bowie was one of those singers who made it through to the mainstream and when he died of cancer at the age of sixty-nine, having just failed to reach his biblical allotment of three score years and ten, politicians of all different stripes were lining up to praise him even if they had little time for his music when he was alive. People spontaneously wanted to express their grief at his passing and many of them went to a Brixton mural to do so.