In August 2015, a derelict lido in Weston-super-Mare filled with signs for a movie that didn't exist. Locals were told a Hollywood outfit called Grey Fox Productions was shooting a crime thriller. It was Banksy, building a fake theme park called Dismaland behind the fence. Eleven years later, the same seafront gets painted again, and this time nobody has to pretend it's something else.
The theme park that wasn't real
Dismaland opened at the old Tropicana lido on 21 August 2015 and closed 27 September. Banksy called it a family theme park unsuitable for children. He funded the build himself and made ten new pieces for it, then handed wall space to 58 of the 60 artists he'd invited, including Jeff Gillette, whose Dismayland paintings partly inspired the whole bit. Tickets were three pounds, capped at 4,000 a day, and still 150,000 people queued over five weeks to walk through a bemusement park with a crashed fairytale carriage and a burnt-out castle. When it closed, the timber went to Calais to help build shelters in the refugee camp known as the Jungle.
Upfest exports itself to the seaside
Dismaland was a stunt. What's happening in Weston-super-Mare now is infrastructure. Upfest started in 2008 when printer and gallery owner Stephen Hayles got about twenty artists together for one day at the Tobacco Factory in Bedminster, Bristol, to raise money for the children's charity NACOA. By 2011 it had grown to more than 250 artists and had donated £15,000. At its 2015 peak, 250 artists from 25 countries covered 30,000 square feet of wall in three days. It now runs as a 17-day programme pulling in 80,000 visitors and is generally called Europe's biggest street art festival.
Since 2021, Upfest has run a spin-off down the coast in Weston-super-Mare: Weston Wallz. Same organisers, same appetite for covering blank walls, smaller town.
Twenty walls, ten days, one seafront
The 2026 edition runs 17 to 26 July, with roughly twenty walls going up across the town centre and seafront. Two are community murals. Two are Scale Up commissions, built specifically to let emerging local artists work at a size they wouldn't get to touch otherwise. The full artist lineup was still being finalised and due for announcement later in July, but the structure was locked: ten days of production work building to a Spray Jam weekend on 25 and 26 July, when artists paint live on giant canvases in the Italian Gardens from 10am to 6pm, open for anyone to walk up and watch the wall get made in real time.
A town that keeps saying yes
Weston-super-Mare isn't an obvious art-world stop. It's a faded Victorian resort with a pier and a beach that vanishes at low tide, the kind of place seaside-decline pieces get written about. That's part of why Dismaland landed the way it did, a serious artist quietly rebuilding a joke theme park in a town nobody expected it in. Weston Wallz doesn't have that element of surprise. It announces itself months ahead, names a return date, and hands over walls on purpose. But it's the same bet twice: that a struggling seaside town can pull people in with paint instead of nostalgia. Ten years after Dismaland shut and its timber went to Calais, Weston-super-Mare is still testing whether that bet pays off, just permanently now instead of for five weeks.
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