part0024

Special Patrol Group (SPG) are a shadowy subvertising organisation based in London. They’re thought to be named after the controversial, and now disbanded, Metropolitan Police Force unit notoriously responsible for the death of activist Blair Peach.

The SPG started subvertising by taking designs from STRIKE! Magazine and installing them in bus stop 6-sheet spaces, billboards and London Underground ad spaces. In 2015 they were invited to be part of Banksy’s Dismaland exhibition, where they gave demonstrations in bus stop hacking, and first made their Ad Space Hack Pack available.

More recently they’ve been installing subverts on behalf of other campaigns and plastering London with their own anarchist-inspired art and counter-propaganda.

The first campaign by the Special Patrol Group was an action to counter what they claimed was the propaganda of the Metropolitan Police Force’s “Confidence Campaign”—a hyper-localised poster marketing campaign targeted at “areas with low confidence in the police.” In November 2014, three designs were installed in around 30 sites in London—including outside New Scotland Yard, headquarters of the British Police Force—mimicking the police’s own posters, but with “more honest” messaging (the tagline, Total Propaganda, is a subversion of the Met’s Total Policing slogan). The designs highlighted institutional police racism, the unlawful killing of Mark Duggan, and discriminatory cannabis laws. The bus-stop installs went viral and were featured by several major news outlets.

The Met did another round of confidence campaign posters early in 2015, and the SPG again responded with their own campaign. This time they focussed on deaths in custody, police corruption, and the amount of public money the Met spent on their own pointless propaganda campaigns. 117

Downloadable versions of all the designs were made available through STRIKE! Magazine ’s website, to encourage people inspired by the campaign do their own subvertising.118

On the first day back to work for most in 2015, quotes from David Graeber’s article “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” that questioned the nature of work under capitalism were inserted over regular ads on the London Underground system.119 Images of the installs spread quickly on the internet and received major news coverage. This is the start of a trend of linking their subvertising back to articles and anarchist theory.

Two weeks before the UK General Election, the Special Patrol Group—whose work is informed by anarchist theory—install designs questioning the voting system in bus stops around London. The three designs read: Don’t Vote: Engage With Politics!; Don’t Vote: Spoil Your Ballet!; and Don’t Vote: Take to the Streets! The posters feature a url that links to a page debunking the voting system and giving reasons why citizens should boycott it; an anonymous member of the Special Patrol Group gives an interview explaining the action to Huck magazine.120

The Special Patrol Group are invited to Banksy’s Dismaland exhibition. On site they give tutorials in subvertising to visitors, using a bus stop ad-cabinet that has been installed especially for this purpose. They also make available the Ad Space Hack Pack, which contains the three tools needed to open most bus stops in the UK, as well as a guide to how to use them. Over 2,000 sets are sold during Dismaland’s five-week run.

During the course of Dismaland, the Department for Security and Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition happens at the Excel Centre. The arms fair is widely protested every year. Artists from Dismaland—Darren Cullen, STRIKE! Magazine , Matt Bonner, and Barnbrook Studio—create designs that are installed in bus stops around London and on London Underground advertising spaces. Over 300 designs are installed and the action is featured by several major news outlets.121

Special Patrol Group is invited to be part of Glastonbury Festival. An advertising cabinet is installed on site as part of a bus stop installation, which features brand designs subverted with the “Advertising Shits in Your Head” slogan. The group also use the festival to launch their international Ad Hack Manifesto.122 When Glastonbury ends, the group install the ad-cabinet in DIY Space for London (an arts venue, activism space, and co-operative) where it is used for training others in ad hacking workshops.

Special Patrol Group’s latest campaign sees them re-imagining advertising spaces on the London Underground—particularly in terms of who gets to occupy them. Using the tagline “Subvertisers for London—Public Space Matters” in subverted Transport for London branding, the group have made templates available for artists and designers to work with campaigns that wouldn’t normally have access to these premium spaces of public communication. They’ve then been printing the new designs and distributing them freely at subvertising workshops, so the installs themselves are carried out anonymously, autonomously, and horizontally.