What's Happening on a Street Corner in the UK Is Bananas

Bananas are a delicious, healthy treat. I like mine a little green and underripe unless I’m eating them with peanut butter, but your mileage may vary. Bananas are also a staple of physical comedy; tons of slapstick bits involve slipping on a banana peel (which I don’t imagine is all that common in real life).

What bananas aren’t good for is serving as a decoration on a street corner, but a plate of bananas that keeps appearing on a corner in a town in Nottinghamshire in the UK is a bizarre mystery. And residents don’t find it appealing (see what I did there?).

A BBC report from last month explains that a plate of 16-20 unpeeled bananas “appears on the second day of every month on the corner of Abbey Road and Wensor Avenue in Beeston, and residents say it has been a constant in their lives for more than a year.” Nobody knows how or why the plate of bananas pops up like clockwork.

"I've asked around in the local community, but no one really knows and no one can tell me anything," resident Clare Short told the BBC. "[The bananas] appear early in the morning on the second of the month, I see them on my way to work. I'd love to know the answers to this."

Bless her heart, Short tried to put a stop to the banana mystery by putting up a sign in January that read:

PLEASE, RESPECTFULLY: NO MORE BANANAS!!
The uncollected plates and rotting bananas leave such a mess!
Wishing a Happy New Year to you all!
From a Nottingham Clean Champion street cleaner volunteer.

When the bananas appeared again on Jan. 2, Short knew that her sign wasn’t doing any good. She said, "I've come to take the signs down because I don't really want to make it like a feud, I don't want it to become a big thing. I think it's a special thing for [someone] and I wish them well. But if they could come back and clean up the mess a few days later that would be lovely. I'm going to keep an eye on it and keep cleaning up the mess."

Other residents don’t care for the bananas either. Locals described them as “strange,” “annoying,” “disgusting,” and “gross.”

Local reporter Phil Campbell recently encountered two men who are determined to get to the bottom of the banana-plate mystery.

“Upon arriving at the location via some quiet side roads, it didn’t take long until two brilliantly engaging individuals also showed up — Luke Roberts and Jai Brewer, otherwise known as Lawd Lukan and Mustard Yellow,” Campbell wrote. The duo runs a YouTube channel, and the men were determined to get to the bottom of the banana conundrum.

“We came up here around seven o’clock last night and there was nobody here at that point so we spoke to a couple of neighbours and that’s when they started giving us names,” Roberts told Campbell. “So we went away, back to our hotel room, and we thought we’ll wait till around midnight, maybe two o’clock-ish and we’ll go down and see if anything had happened. Then we saw online that the bananas were there so we jumped in the car and came back.”

The bananas appeared on the corner a day early this time — on Feb. 1 — and someone removed them by 8:00 the following morning. Roberts and Brewer still aren’t sure why the bananas keep appearing, but they don’t think that it’s a religious ritual as some locals suggest. Regardless, it’s an intriguing mystery.

“It’s great, it’s fantastic,” Roberts said. “It’s so silly as well, that’s the thing, it’s like a silly adventure and it’s harmless and it’s fun.”

“It’s so unique and silly,” Brewer added. “When trying to explain to our families that we’re going to be away for the weekend, ‘Ah okay what you doing?’ ‘Oh you see there’s these bananas…’ They’re very accommodating.”

With that kind of attitude, who knows? Maybe they’ll solve the banana mystery one day.