BANK JOB - THE BOOK

May 2019. In the shadow of the towers of London’s financial centre, Canary Wharf, a golden ford transit van explodes. With this single act, £1.2 million of high interest ‘toxic debt’ is cancelled in a London community.

This ‘Big Bang 2’ was the culmination of an art project by filmmaker and artist duo, Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn, made in response to the financial crash of 2008. Bank Job tells the white-knuckle adventure story of London-based couple who were fed up of an economic structure that pushed creative people to the fringes.

Influenced by the Strike Debt movement in the US that opened their eyes to the dark heart of the financial system, they set up a printing press in a disused bank in Walthamstow, East London, and printed their own banknotes. The faces of local unsung heroes in their community replaced the traditional historical figures we are used to seeing on bank notes, and when the notes were sold as Art, half the proceeds went to these local stalwarts and half for the purchase and destruction of local high interest debt.

Both a daring tale and a deeply personal memoir, this book opens with honest reflections of the authors’ own experiences of debt through the eyes of their childhood to their own adult life, and goes on to examine the wider impact of a society that for generations has entangled the concept of money with a person’s identity. Furthermore, for many readers it will be an empowering education about money. Dan and Hilary write in the book, ‘If 85% of our politicians don’t understand how money is created there is an urgent need for some far-reaching economic education not only to help us understand the system as it is but to take the next step in reimagining it.’