Banksy artwork stolen from London street

Posted On August 9, 2024August 9, 2024

Over the past few days, the legendary street artist Banksy has been creating works around London. Dubbed Bansky’s ‘London Zoo’ exhibit, each of the works unveiled thus far has been centred around animals placed in urban areas of the city. However, the notoriety surrounding this series of works has, by this point, attracted some opportunistic art thieves to the commercial potential of Banksy.

The fourth artwork to be included in this series was revealed on August 8th, with Bansky painting a howling wolf on a satellite dish in Peckham in his usual stencil style. Meant to represent a wolf howling at the moon, the artwork lasted mere hours before being torn down by thieves. 

Located on Rye Lane in Peckham, in the south-east of the city, the satellite dish was stolen in broad daylight during the afternoon of August 8th. According to eyewitnesses, it took three men to remove the artwork, with one up on the roof, taking the dish down, and two others guarding a ladder. The Metropolitan Police have since shared that they received reports of the theft, but no arrests have been made as of yet. 

Bansky himself has remained fairly quiet about the theft, as is to be expected. The Bristol-based artist has remained anonymous since the 1990s, largely through the secretive nature of his work. In fact, the only reason that this new series is being credited to the street artist is because his social media accounts posted photos of the works with no comments. 

The first work in the series, unveiled on August 5th, depicted a stencil of a goat perched on a ledge just underneath a CCTV camera on Kew Bridge.

Following the discovery of the work, Banksy followed the goat piece up with two silhouettes of elephants reaching out to each other across blocked-out windows in Chelsea. 

Until August 8th, the works had largely been limited to south London. However, the third artwork in the series popped up on Brick Lane. Another stencil work, that piece depicts three monkeys swinging along a bridge. The works might be a comment upon the destruction of nature by urban landscapes and industrial pollution.

The exact meaning behind the artworks remains largely unknown, although some have speculated that they provide comment on the recent far-right riots which have engulfed cities around the nation – comparing rioters to animals. If that is the case, however, it seems peculiar to limit the works entirely to London, particularly when the riots were most prominent in other areas of the United Kingdom.

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