Meet Britain’s biggest vandal who brags of spraying graffiti from ‘Shaftesbury to Shrewsbury, to Burnham-on-Crouch’

SKULKING across London Bridge in the dead of night – stolen spray can in hand – Britain’s biggest vandal admires his latest handiwork.

Few know what graffiti sprayer 10 Foot looks like, but most people in the UK will have seen his artless scrawl

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He has daubed his tag — graffiti signature — on everything from trains to historic buildings up and down the land, contributing to an annual clean-up bill of £1billion for taxpayers.

Now, in an interview with the Financial Times, 10 Foot has boasted about defacing “almost every middle-sized town across the UK, from Shaftesbury to Shrewsbury, to Grimsby to Burnham-on-Crouch.

“All the far flung islands . . . Wight, Scillies, Shetlands, Orkneys, Inner and Outer Hebrides”.

The list of global cities and regions he claims he has daubed spans the globe: Paris, Berlin, NYC, Philadelphia, Buenos Aires, Funchal, Lisbon, Oslo, Copen- hagen, Snowdonia, Dublin, Galway, Cork, Waterford, Los Angeles, San Diego, Washington DC, New Orleans, Miami, Monterrey, Mexico City, Guatemala City, Guadalajara, Ajaccio, Milan, Sicily, Corsica, Bari, Tirana, Moscow, Marseille, Rome, Bogota, Ku- wait, Pereira, Quito, Port-au-Prince, Kingston Jamaica, Kingston Surrey, Guildford, Glasgow, San Antonio, Dominican Republic, Havana, Cancun, Panama, Taipei, Bangkok, Tokyo, Okinawa, Kyoto and Osaka.

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And despite almost being killed in the process, he has vowed to carry on defacing trains and dodging trackside security, which he claims to know more about than most British Transport staff.

Ex-Scotland Yard detective Peter Bleksley told The Sun on Sunday: “He may choose to revel in being Britain’s worst vandal but in reality he’s a numbskull who needs to be taught the error of his ways.

“Graffiti, especially in London, is getting worse. It is splurged on walls, bridges and trains and blights everything it touches.

“We need much tougher sentences and those doing this mindless crime should be sent to scrub and whitewash prison walls.

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“Otherwise, we risk encouraging a new generation of criminals to follow in their footsteps.”

Although those caught can be liable under the Criminal Damage Act 1971, prosecutions are rare.

In fact, for some, such as Banksy, whose latest creation was revealed this week in Margate, Kent, street art can be highly prized.

But 10 Foot’s vandalism hits commuters and taxpayers hard.

In London alone, £100million was spent last year dealing with graffiti and London Underground spends £10million a year just on replacing damaged glass.

Sharon Turner, from British Transport Police, said: “Why do you think your fare goes up every year?

“When you’re standing on the platform and your train’s cancelled, do they tell you why they’ve cancelled that train? Has that train been taken out of service because someone’s drawn all over it? Then they’ve got to clean the train.

‘We need to deal out a lot harsher sentences’

“If they’ve etched or put acid on the windows, they have to replace the glass. Never mind that, if they’ve left acid and the cleaner doesn’t know, there’s damage to the cleaner. It impacts everybody.”

Unlike the words “10 Foot”, which he sprays all over the capital, the criminal goes to great lengths to keep his identity hidden.

In the Financial Times interview, which did not reveal his real name, he brags about stealing every can of paint he has used in nearly two decades of vandalism.

He said: “I think I’ve used more paint than anyone in the country. I never knew it cost £10.99 a can.’’

10 Foot has a particular obsession for tagging bridges and overpasses, but also vandalises shutters, windows, bus stops and London’s sprawling network of tracksides and train carriages.

It can end in tragedy. In the past ten years, four graffiti artists have been fatally hit by trains.

Yet despite the deaths, the most recent major report into graffiti revealed it is a growing crime and is blighting more and more villages, towns and cities than ever.

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Sharon added: “I really don’t understand it. We turn up at people’s houses and have to tell their mum or dad that they’re dead because of this. It astounds me.

“Our court system is broken and we need to be dealing out a lot harsher sentences.”

Experts argue that graffiti can encourage other crime as people lose a sense of pride in their area.

Former Met detective Chris Phillips said: “There are many studies on this subject that show signs of disorder in a neighbourhood, like a broken window or graffiti, encourage petty crimes and lead to more serious crimes.

“The fear of crime increases. Those who deface our cities with graffiti are criminals and this person deserves very hard justice.

“The impacts are so much greater than simply damaging a wall.”

A spate of 10 Foot copycat incidents, both in London and across the country, have been springing up too.

Data recently released under Freedom Of Information laws found councils across the UK now regularly spend six-figure sums each year removing graffiti.

According to the probe by renovation firm Structural Repairs, the council with the highest number of graffiti incidents each year is Hackney, in East London, which is currently dealing with more than 29,000 cases.

The other worst affected areas were Leicester, Oxford, Doncaster and the London boroughs of Camden, Greenwich, Islington, Enfield, Haringey and Westminster.

As well as on trains, graffiti is a growing problem on roads.

National Highways, which is in charge of the UK’s road and motorway network, says it can cost £10,000 to remove one single instance of graffiti.

It not only leads to road closures but creates a distraction for drivers, which can lead to deadly accidents.

National Highways is trialling the use of a wall-climbing, paint-spraying robot to paint over graffiti as well as trying technology to detect vandals at graffiti hotspots.

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Tory MP Andrew Bridgen, whose Leicester constituency is among the top ten worst affected, said: “There’s a huge cost to society. I object to the phrase graffiti artist.

“Those behind it need to take responsibility and pay the price.”