For the third time this year, Banksy has created a new work of street art. The new piece has been confirmed in the anonymous British artist’s customary fashion, with an Instagram post.
The artwork shows two children lying on their backs and looking toward the heavens, with one pointing a finger skyward. It was spotted Monday outside the Tottenham Court Road Tube station in London, near the landmark Brutalist Centre Point skyscraper.
As Christmas approaches, the work could be read as two children hopefully looking for signs of Santa Claus in the sky, which would be an uncommonly sweet statement from the often sardonic artist.
But its location points to a more critical dimension, owing to the symbolism of Centre Point. The 34-storey tower was built in 1966 as office space by real estate tycoon Harry Hyams. It remained vacant for many years even amid a housing crisis as the developer awaited a single corporate tenant to lease it, thus becoming a symbol of the housing issue; a homeless shelter nearby was ironically named Centrepoint. Among the tower’s occupants have been talent agency William Morris; Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Aramco; and gaming company EA Games.
It was converted in 2015 into multimillion-dollar luxury apartments after it was acquired by real estate investors Almacantar, but the company has reportedly abandoned efforts to sell the apartments after receiving too many lowball offers—even as the city of London has fallen short of homebuilding targets, homelessness is at record highs, and families are priced out, as the BBC has reported.
With that in mind, some observers say the mural is meant to show unhoused children lying in the street. Artist Daniel Lloyd-Morgan, speaking to the BBC, pointed out that many people were walking past the piece, ignoring it. “They walk past homeless people,” he said, “and they don’t see them lying in the street.
“Everybody is having a good time,” he said, “but there are a lot of children who are not having a good time at Christmas.”
A new artwork by Banksy in Queen’s Mews, Bayswater, London.
Unusually for Banksy, the artwork is doubled, with an identical mural also appearing three miles to the west in Queen’s Mews, a quiet cobbled street in Bayswater, where it was painted on a wall above a row of garages. That is the one that appears on Instagram, where the artist has some 13.7 million followers. At time of writing, it has been live for two hours and garnered 354,000 likes.
It’s the first new Banksy work in three months, since he created a mural at the Royal Court of Justice in September that showed a judge beating a protestor with a gavel. That piece was read as alluding to recent arrests at a pro-Palestinian protest, and was quickly walled off by local authorities.
His previous piece, in May, popped up in the city of Marseille, on France’s Mediterranean coast, where a sidewalk bollard seems to cast a shadow that turns into a lighthouse, superimposed with the words “I want to be what you saw in me.”
Last December, the artist posted an image of a woman breastfeeding an infant, resembling images of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child; her nipple is replaced with a leaky pipe with rust stains below it, giving rise to much speculation about its meaning. That piece was never located outside of social media.
