It is, in some ways, the ultimate accolade. Put up a piece of public art in London and if the cabbies like it, you know you’ve struck gold. Yinka Shonibare knows how it feels to tap that seam.
His Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, which sat on the Fourth Plinth from 2010 to 2012, when it moved to its permanent home outside the National Maritime Museum, remains one of the most loved of the temporary exhibits, and a taxi driver favourite, he tells me when we meet at his studio in a former warehouse in Hackney.
