Am I the only person to have noticed that a van belonging to Benenden school has been parked for well over a month opposite the Quarterhouse in Tontine Street? When it first caught my attention, I thought that some members of the school were either visiting the new theatre or staging some sort of dramatic production.

However closer inspection revealed that the van had no seats and looked rather the worse for wear, unlikely therefore to be the sort of vehicle still owned by a school described in the Good Schools Guide as “Everyone’s idea of a traditional, up-market, girls’ boarding school though not remotely hidebound by tradition; cutting-edge and unconventional in multiple ways, in a stunning setting and underpinned with common sense”, whose most famous alumni is Princess Anne. With annual fees of £28,000 one would have thought they could afford something better.

But perhaps like many independent schools, it has fallen on hard times. Could it possibly be an advertisement for the school, such as those often seen on old farm wagons in fields, as one falls in and out of sleep on the long train journey to London or crawls slowly round the M25? Was this an attempt to encourage more applications by parking an older little used vehicle in Tontine Street? If so the marketing team at the Creative Foundation deserves congratulations, since it bodes well for the Creative Quarter that Benenden sees Tontine Street as a promising place to site such an advertisement. The School must also have come to some agreement with Shepway District Council as at the time of writing it has incurred no parking ticket

Being an always curious person, on subsequent visits I took an even closer look. In the windows are clean and possibly new lace curtains. In the back are a black rubbish bag and a card showing the meaning of British road signs, together with a small cardboard box. On the front seat and on the dash board are some mineral water bottles and a patterned cloth.

Suddenly it came to me. The net curtains and the careful arrangement of the van’s contents indicated an art installation – a vehicular Unmade bed. Indeed I even caught sight of what was possibly an unused condom in the distant recesses of the van. But who was responsible. To some extent it had the trade mark of Matt Rowe of Bed and Breakfast and Club Shepway. On the other hand could it be a try out by a more eminent artist for the next Folkestone Triennial?

A prize of £25 if offered for:

An imaginative description of why the van is there and how it came to be there.

Or

An artist’s statement of the van as an installation.

Entries to: Spurrier@btconnect.com