A school photograph of Robert Gunningham who many believe to be Banksy
Two years ago, the Mail on Sunday carried out an exhaustive year-long investigation in an attempt to reveal Banksy's true identity.
The search began with a photograph taken in Jamaica showing a man in a blue shirt and jeans, with a hint of a smile on his face and a spray can at his feet.
Taken four years ago, it was said to show Banksy at work. When the picture was published it appeared to be the first chink in the armour of anonymity with which the artist has shielded himself ever since his work began to attract the attention of the art world.
Naturally, Banksy denied the picture was of him.
Armed with this photograph, reporters travelled to Bristol, long said to have been Banksy's home city, where they made contact with a man who claimed to have once met the artist in the flesh.
This man claimed not only to have met the elusive artist but was able to give a name - Robin Gunningham - and it doesn't require much imagination to work out how such a name could result in the nickname Banksy.
Robin's father, Peter Gordon Gunningham, 66, is a retired contracts manager from the Whitehall area of Bristol. His mother, Pamela Ann Dawkin-Jones, 67, was a company director's secretary and grew up in the exclusive surroundings of Clifton. She now works in a nursing home.
When Robin was nine, the family moved to a larger home in the same street and it is there he spent his formative years and became interested in graffiti.
A neighbour, Anthony Hallett, recalls the couple moving into the street as newlyweds and living there until 1998. They have since separated. When reporters showed Mr Hallett the Jamaica photograph, he said the man in it was Robin Gunningham.
In 1984, Robin, then 11, donned a black blazer, grey trousers and striped tie to attend the renowned Bristol Cathedral School, which currently charges fees of £9,240 a year and lists supermodel Sophie Anderton as a former pupil.
A school photograph, taken in 1989, of a bespectacled Robin Gunningham shows a discernible resemblance to the man in the Jamaica photograph.
Indeed, fellow pupils remember Robin, who was in Deans House, as being a particularly gifted artist.
Scott Nurse, an insurance broker who was in Robin's class, said: 'He was one of three people in my year who were extremely talented at art. He did lots of illustrations. I am not at all surprised if he is Banksy. He was also in the house rugby team and I think he played hockey as well.'
In the rare interviews Banksy has given (always anonymously), the artist has acknowledged that it was while at school that he first became interested in graffiti.
Robin Gunningham left school at 16 after doing GCSEs and began dabbling in street art.
By 1998 he was living in Easton, Bristol, with Luke Egan, who went on to exhibit with Banksy at Santa's Ghetto, an art store which launched at Christmas 2001 in London's West End.
However, when reporters approached him, Egan initially denied knowing and living with either Banksy or Robin Gunningham, even though he had exhibited with the former and the electoral roll had showed him living with the latter. He eventually said: 'I lived with a guy, with Robin Gunningham. But ... '
'But you're saying he wasn't Banksy?'
'Well, he wasn't then. I lived with him ages ago. I don't think Banksy was around then anyway.'
Egan and Gunningham are believed to have left the house when the owner wanted to sell it.
Camilla Stacey, a curator at Bristol's Here Gallery who bought the property in 2000, said that Banksy and Robin Gunningham are one and the same person.
She knew the house had been inhabited by Banksy because of the artwork left there - and she used to get post for him in the name of Robin Gunningham.
'I bought the house that he used to live in,' she told us. 'He had rented out a room but I think there had been problems with the tenants and the landlord had to sort of repossess it or whatever, so he was just selling it.
'When I moved in, the place had been covered in graffiti and stuff like that. I threw things in the bin.
'At that point Banksy was just someone putting up stuff around Bristol. He was just another artist who had graffitied around Bristol. It keeps me awake at night sometimes thinking about it.'
In 1998 that Banksy and Inkie collaborated with other graffiti artists on a 400-yard Walls On Fire hoarding around Bristol's Harbourside.
In local writer Steve Wright's unofficial biography, Banksy's Bristol: Home Sweet Home, Inkie said: 'I helped Banksy organise the event but took a bit of a back seat and got pretty drunk on the day if I remember rightly.'
Banksy moved to London around the turn of the millennium, once again at the same time as a certain Robin Gunningham.
Robin lived in a flat in Kingsland Road, Hackney, East London, with Jamie Eastman, who worked for Bristol's Hombre record label. Banksy drew a number of the record company's album covers.
In 2001 Banksy had his first unofficial London exhibition at which he spray-painted 12 works on to the whitewashed walls of a tunnel in Rivington, Shoreditch.
But it was his show Turf War, in July 2003, held in a warehouse just yards from Robin Gunningham's flat, that put Banksy on the map.
The exhibition included live pigs and a heifer sprayed with an Andy Warhol likeness. The Queen was depicted as a chimp. An animal rights activist chained herself to the railings in protest but the RSPCA gave its approval to the show.
That same year Banksy shuffled into the Tate dressed as a pensioner and glued a picture to the wall - it stayed there for two-and-a-half hours - and demonstrated against the Iraq War. He had arrived.
