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Banner drop

Open-knowledge reference entry

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 27, 2026
Entity authorityQ4856938
Source-derived summary

A banner drop is the protest action of putting a banner in a public place to spread a message and raise awareness. The banner may target a corporation, a law, a political campaign, or any activism. The banner may itself be dropped on an activists' target, or in conjunction with the beginning of a campaign.

Performing a banner drop may constitute criminal vandalism and criminal trespassing depending on where the banner is placed and on the legal jurisdiction in which the activity occurred.

There are several ways in which banners are constructed and placed. Most often, a banner is decorated with an activist slogan or picture using paint, dye or, in some cases, screen printing. The banner is then often either tied to the target or secured to it using ropes and weights. Alternatively they can be held by activists within and atop pedestrian walkways

Global banner drop

#BridgesNotWalls was a global banner drop campaign to protest against Donald Trump's stance on immigration. On January 20, 2017, the day of Trump's presidential inauguration, activists around the world dropped banners from over 200 iconic bridges across five continents.

In London, banners were dropped from at least eight bridges spanning the River Thames including the Tower Bridge, London Bridge, Southwark, Millennium, Blackfriars, Waterloo, Westminster and Vauxhall bridges.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Banner drop” as open-knowledge reference entry. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2017—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Banner, drop and Open-knowledge can be independently traced.
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Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as open-knowledge reference entry. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4856938. The first chronological checks are 2017.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Banner drop” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.