A Banksy that startled London last summer has been packed away until its next act: a starring role in the London Museum.
The work, which features a fish tank full of Piranhas, appeared overnight on August 11, 2024, as one of nine animal-themed interventions the artist installed across the capital over nine consecutive days. Painted on the windows of a police sentry box in the financial district, the mural transformed the booth into a fish tank. Looking closer, though, viewers would find that fish aren’t harmless—they’re piranhas with serrated teeth. Critics suggested the piece alluded to Damien Hirst’s pickled shark, repositioned here as a comment on surveillance and policing.
The City of London Corporation quickly removed the booth, according to the BBC, first putting it on display at Guildhall Yard before transferring it into storage. It will resurface in 2026 at the London Museum’s new Smithfield home, part of a $280 million relocation project expected to draw two million visitors a year.
“Our collection now spans from Roman graffiti to Banksy,” head of curatorial Glyn Davies told the BBC.
Piranhas was also the consensus favorite among Banksy-watchers, and ranked first in a series that included monkeys swinging from a bridge, elephants peering from Chelsea windows, and a rhinoceros mounting a Nissan Micra, it stood out for its color, placement, and layered allusions. Kelly Grovier, author of a forthcoming book on the artist, called it “a ghostly shoal of ghoulish piranhas” that “rehabilitates” Hirst’s now-blunted shark.
The wider series briefly turned London into a zoological guessing game. Each morning in August, Instagram users speculated on the meaning of the latest apparition: a wolf howling from a satellite dish, pelicans looting a fish shop sign, a goat poised precariously over Kew Bridge. Half the fun was conjecture, while the other half was seeing how long the works survived before vandals, rival taggers, or local authorities intervened.
