“You can’t please everyone, hey?” he notes.

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“I’m not a massive royalist, but then I’m interested in history and I understand the path we got to. I come from the UK, obviously, my granddad took me to the Tower of London when I was a kid; when I lived in London I was aware of this royal history.

“How I see my role as an artist is almost to document memory. You paint something on the wall and hopefully it will outlive all of us. You are almost cementing something in time and helping people to remember.”

Sale painted the queen in flattering profile using a stencilling technique by which he applied six layers of paint graduating from dark to light shades.

It took two and a half hours to create the Sydenham Road portrait. “I’ve never been told off for painting a wall, and I’ve been painting street art for 10 years,” Sale said. “But I’ve always had it in my back pocket that if anyone doesn’t like it, I’ve got a paint and decorating business, and I’ll come back tomorrow and paint over it.”

Sale memorialised American George Floyd in June 2020 on a garage near Enmore Park, as a reminder of injustice. In the same vein, he painted two Indigenous boys beneath an Aboriginal flag at half-mast in Sydney Street, Marrickville.

“When I went to university and studied art, art was this high thing that the common person couldn’t understand. Art to me was something you had to go to an art gallery and drink wine and to talk to intelligent people about. When you put art on the street and you give it away the everyday person can walk past it and enjoy it for what it is.”

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