A new artwork by Banksy has been removed from a street in south London less than half an hour after it was confirmed to be genuine.
The elusive artist confirmed the work, a traffic stop sign featuring military drones, was his in a social media post shortly after midday on Friday.
Two men were seen taking down the sign at the intersection of Southampton Way and Commercial Way in Peckham at around 12.30pm.
Image: Banksy’s new piece of art in Peckham
A photographer captured images of the pair removing the artwork.
One could be seen standing on a Lime bike while using bolt cutters to free the sign.
They were then pictured running down the street with the sign in hand.
A man who witnessed the removal said he “watched in awe” as a man “bashed it with his hands”.
Image: A person appears to slip as they remove the Banksy artwork
The witness, who wanted to be referred to only as Alex, rode a Lime bike to the artwork, which was then used by another man to stand on as he removed the art.
The 26-year-old told the PA news agency: “I opened Instagram and I saw it was posted four minutes before and I was about to go on my lunch break. There were about two people there when I got there. We were all sort of admiring it and taking pictures.
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“This guy comes up and grabs it, we watched in awe as he bashed it. He put the Lime bike under the sign, stood on the Lime bike and tried to hit the sign, he hit it with his hands and it wasn’t going anywhere.”
He added: “He fell off the Lime bike at one point. He disappeared and went away and about two minutes later he reappeared with bolt cutters and just sort of tried and tried and tried while everyone was watching.
“We said ‘what are you doing?’ but no one really knew what to do, we sort of just watched it happen. We were all a bit bemused; there was some honking of car horns.
“He ripped it off and ran across the road and ran away. He said nothing. He didn’t seem to care that much about the art itself. There was someone else there but I don’t know if they were together.
“I went there thinking that people want that, I wanted to see it before something happened to it. Before it was taken, someone else said ‘shall we take it?'”
The Met police said it was aware of the incident, adding: ” Our local authority partners were informed at the time and have since replaced the road sign to avoid endangering road users.
“We await any communication from the local authority as to whether they wish to report a crime.”
It is understood Banksy is not behind the removal.
Sky News has contacted Southwark Council for comment.
It is not the first time a Banksy artwork has been removed this year.
A mural weighing 3.8 tonnes called Valentine’s Day Mascara appeared on the side of a house in Margate, Kent, on Valentine’s Day and was dismantled within hours of Banksy sharing a series of photos of it online.
It depicted a 1950s housewife with a swollen eye and missing tooth having thrown a man into a chest freezer.
The artwork appeared to incorporate other objects including a broken garden chair, a frying pan and an empty beer bottle, which were removed.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
