Month: April 2026

Bansky: Limitless exhibition

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A timeline at the start of the Banksy Limitless immersive experience

This is the second of my blog posts about last month’s trip to London. The first was about Kinky Boots, and this is about the Banksy: Limitless exhibition which was the other thing that we pre-booked before travelling.

You’ve probably heard of the pseudonymous street artist Banksy. This exhibition is an ‘immersive experience’ which has around 250 of his artworks on display. These are a mixture of prints and recreations of his works, and include those displayed at Dismaland, the Walled Off Hotel, Ukraine and his London animal trail.

I’m not massively into art, but I find Banksy interesting – not least because his true identity remains a mystery to most. All most people know about him is that he is male, white, and that he probably comes from Bristol where his earlier works appeared. He has been producing street art since at least 1999, if not earlier.

He’s probably best known for his stencilled street art. Stencils allow him to design his pieces in his studio; then, when he’s out in a public place, he can then quickly spray paint his works and move on before he gets in trouble. However, his art takes many forms and this exhibition covers lots of them.

Immersive experience

Banksy: Limitless is billed as an ‘immersive experience’, which made me think about that infamous Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow. Thankfully, it’s not a load of AI generated slop. Instead, whilst some parts are like a typical art gallery, others parts are laid out like a tube station, or a recreation of Dismaland. The web site says that you can expect to spend at least 80 minutes here; we spent well over two hours in the end. And, of course, you Exit Through the Gift Shop.

It’s important to note that Banksy himself hasn’t authorised this exhibition. Instead, it’s a collection of (mostly) privately owned pieces and prints that have been brought together. I really enjoyed it.

Accessibility

Banksy: Limitless is in Sussex Mansions on Old Brompton Road. It’s a short walk from South Kensington tube station on the Piccadilly, Circle and District Lines. The nearest step-free tube station is Knightsbridge, the previous stop on the Piccadilly line, which is a one mile walk.

The building is wheelchair accessible. The exhibition is across two floors, and there is a lift available. There are also toilets on site. The nearest Changing Places toilets are at the Science Museum, and the Royal Brompton Hospital, which are both a short distance away. Strobe lighting is used in the exhibition, and there is also an optional section towards the end that people with motion sickness are advised to avoid.

Ticket prices start at £20 each; Google’s AI summary offered me the discount code LONDONBY10 which gave me a 10% discount. Tickets are handled by Fever who we also used for The Art of the Brick, and you can earn points from your booking to use against future bookings (although this can’t be combined with discount codes).

Happy Easter!

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I hop you are having a good Easter break, if you celebrate it. As mentioned on Wednesday, we’re staying with my parents in York, having arrived yesterday and heading home tomorrow. Which, to be fair, is pretty much what we do every year – Covid years excepted.

The Easter weekend is a full two weeks earlier than last year, when Easter was unusually late – I wrote about the dates for Easter last year. Next year, Easter is even earlier, with Easter Sunday falling on the 28th March.

I went down with a cold last weekend, which, bearing in mind our trip to London, commuting to work and an Easter church service for our ten-year-old’s school, isn’t surprising considering how many people I’ve interacted with recently. However, it means that this may be a more subdued Easter weekend. A bit of rest is probably welcome.

The 29 WordPress plugins I use on this blog

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Whilst this blog is powered by WordPress, it’s far from being a vanilla version of WordPress. Whilst I’ve not directly amended any WordPress code (nor should you as it makes updates a pain), I have, over the years, come to rely on various plugins to enhance WordPress’ core features. Right now, I have 29 plugins installed, and so here’s a list of them all and what they do:

ActivityPub

ActivityPub makes my blog available in the Fediverse. So, it’s possible to subscribe to it in Mastodon, for example, and have my blog posts appear, in full text, alongside various toots from regular Mastodon users. Though I don’t use Mastodon as much as I used to, it’s another way of making this blog accessible to people.

I reviewed an earlier version of this plugin back in 2022.

Akismet Anti-spam

Comment spam has always been a problem since blog comments became a thing, and Akismet catches almost all of them whilst letting legitimate ones through. This is the only premium plugin that I currently pay for.

Album Photostream Profile For Flickr

This plugin powers my Photography page, by showing photos that I have recently uploaded to Flickr. Whilst I still pay for my Flickr Pro account, I haven’t uploaded any new photos there in a while.

Featured Images in RSS

This plugin ensures that a post’s featured image appears in the RSS feed. Almost every post has a featured image, and the GeneratePress theme that I use on here uses a post’s featured image as its ‘hero image’ at the top. There’s probably a far more simple plugin available than this one, but it does the job.

Fediverse Embeds

Fediverse Embeds allows you to embed people’s posts from Mastodon and other Fediverse services in a nice way. However, as mentioned before, I don’t really use Mastodon now, so this is just here for a few posts from 2023 and 2024.

IndexNow

IndexNow automatically submits your blog’s URLs to Microsoft’s Bing search engine, along with Yandex and some other search engines that I haven’t heard of. That should mean that new blog posts appear in search results more quickly, and don’t need to wait for a manual crawl.

IndieAuth

IndieAuth lets you use your WordPress blog to log into other web sites that support IndieAuth, and vice versa. To date, I have yet to find a web site that supports login with IndieAuth, but it’s there should I need it.

IndieWeb

IndieWeb is something of a framework plugin that needs to be installed to allow other plugins to work, such as the aforementioned IndieAuth, and Webmention, which is, erm, mentioned below.

Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer

This plugin does two key things – it ensures your new blog posts are backed up to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and also does the same for other URLs that you link to. This is a newer plugin that I wrote about in November.

Koko Analytics

I use Koko Analytics for, well, analytics. It tells me how many visits I get, and on which pages and blog posts. It also shows where people have clicked through from. It doesn’t do much more than that, but that’s a deliberate decision as I don’t want or need to capture massive amounts of data from web site visitors. Here’s my review from 2024.

MailPoet

You can, if you wish, get an email with my new blog posts every Monday, by using the email sign-up form below. This is powered by the MailPoet plugin, and I reviewed it in 2024. As an aside, since I wrote that I’ve switched to sending the emails via MailPoet’s servers instead of my own; I found that Microsoft blocks emails from this site.

Modern Image Formats

This plugin used to be known as WebP Uploads, and would convert any images uploaded as PNG or JPEG files to the more efficient WebP format. It’s now called Modern Image Formats, as it supports the AVIF format too. I also reviewed this one in 2024.

Performance Lab

Modern Image Formats is part of a suite of plugins called Performance Lab, which offer various ways to monitor and improve the performance of your WordPress install. In time, these may become part of WordPress core.

Posts On This Day

This is a simple plugin that adds a widget which shows posts that were made on the same day in previous years. You can see it on the sidebar (or below, if you’re reading this on a mobile device). Obviously, it’s only useful if you have been blogging for at least a year.

Pressidium Cookie Consent

This plugin is responsible for the cookie consent pop-up box that all web sites need to have nowadays apparently. Whilst I try to have as few third-party tracking cookies as possible, this should allow you to opt out of those. I installed and reviewed this one as recently as December last year.

Redirection

Redirection allows you to set up redirects from within the WordPress interface. I use this extensively, as lots of URLs on this site have changed in the 24 years I’ve been running it.

Share on Mastodon

Share on Mastodon is another simple plugin that automatically posts a new status message (or ‘toot’) on Mastodon with a link to new blog posts when they go live.

Simple Yearly Archive

Another simple plugin that is responsible for generating the Archives page, which lists every blog post, split by year, going back to 2002.

Two Factor

This plugin enables two-factor authentication for when I log in as an admin user. I, of course, use a strong and unique password for this blog, but should it ever be compromised, this is another layer of security.

UpdraftPlus

I use UpdraftPlus to take weekly backups of this blog, which are then saved into my Dropbox account. I reviewed it back in 2024, and it recently saved my bacon when I botched an upgrade.

VS Link Manager

Older versions of WordPress used to have a Link Manager, where you could add lists of links to create a Blogroll, for example. The code is still there, but it’s disabled. VS Link Manager re-enables it, and adds a newer widget for putting those links in your sidebar. This powers my blogroll.

W3 Total Cache

Whilst caching plugins aren’t always mandatory with WordPress, having one should make it faster. I’ve always used the free version of W3 Total Cache and it works fine.

Webmention

Webmention is part of the IndieWeb, and is designed to allow people to post comments on their own site that then automatically links back to the post they were commenting on. I use it to allow Brid.gy to work; it means that replies to my posts on Mastodon and Bluesky that have a link to a blog post have those replies posted as comments.

WebSub

WebSub is also part of the IndieWeb, and means that, when new blog posts are published, Superfeedr and WebSubHub are notified. I assume that there’s some kind of benefit to doing so.

WP Crontrol

WP Crontrol offers an interface that allows you to manage the various scheduled tasks that WordPress performs, for example making scheduled posts go live at the correct time. I think I installed this as, sometimes, scheduled tasks were missed and it allowed me to see why.

WP to Buffer

This plugin allows you to share new and updated posts via Buffer, which I use for Bluesky and Facebook Page sharing. I used to also share posts with LinkedIn using Buffer, but not everything I post here is fit for LinkedIn.

WP Toolbelt

WP Toolbelt is a multi-tool plugin which is a bit like Automattic’s Jetpack. However, it does more locally, rather than relying on WordPress.com, and it means that I can do several things without having to install lots of smaller plugins. I wrote about it a couple of years ago; it still works even though its development appears to have been abandoned.

WP-Sweep

WP-Sweep lets you clear out data from your WordPress data that you may not need any more. This includes deleted comments, old post drafts, previous revisions of posts and orphaned metadata. As such, it can reduce the size of your WordPress database. It needs to be used carefully; for example, you don’t want to remove drafts if you’re halfway through writing a draft post.

Yoast SEO

Finally, I use Yoast SEO. This gives you suggestions when writing posts, to ensure that you’re using the right key words, have an image and use headings. It also measures the readability of your posts, so that you can avoid over-using passive language and overly-long sentences. There are also some more advanced features that are designed to optimise your WordPress site so that it could, potentially, appear higher in search engine results.

Le Poisson d’Avril

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A photo of a clownfish in an aquarium. The French refer to an April Fool as 'un poisson d'Avril', which translates as an April Fish.

Something I learned back in secondary school was that the French call an April Fool’s joke ‘un poisson d’Avril’, which literally translates as ‘an April fish’. No April Fool’s Day jokes from me today though.

We’re part way though the Easter holidays here, with our ten-year-old having broken up from school last Friday. It would appear that not all schools are off this week, however; I had an email from Eureka about how they are running their Easter holiday activities over three weeks. Indeed, we would have loved to go to see Olaf Falafel’s Stupidest Super Stupid Show in Leeds on the 14th, but our ten-year-old will be back at school by then.

Christine is working on Good Friday, and so I’ll probably end up taking our ten-year-old to see the new Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Unless the weather ends up being especially good, and we end up doing something outdoors. We’ll then be spending the rest of the Easter weekend with my parents in York, as usual.

So far, my post about Kinky Boots is the only one about what we did in London that has gone live, but there are several more to come throughout this month. We packed quite a lot in to what was only a two-night trip; not having our ten-year-old in tow meant we could be a bit more agile. I also have plenty of other blog posts that I have already written to go live in the coming weeks.

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