A big cat by Banksy appeared, poised ready to pounce, on a bare wooden advertising hoarding on Edgware Road in Cricklewood, north-west London, on Saturday.
The anonymous artist known as Banksy, who confirmed that the image is his at lunchtime on Saturday, is now also promising a little more summer fun to come.
A seventh image may shortly materialise in another surprising location, the Observer has learned. London residents should keep their eyes peeled, a spokesperson suggested, for a few days more.
For a week now, the streets of the capital have been populated by a string of unusual animal sightings, courtesy of Banksy, including pelicans, a goat and a trio of monkeys.
The street artist’s vision is simple: the latest series of graffiti has been designed to cheer up the public during a period when many of the news headlines have been bleak, and light has often been harder to spot than shade.
Banksy’s hope, it is understood, is that the uplifting works cheer people with a moment of unexpected amusement, as well as to gently underline the human capacity for creative play, rather than for destruction and negativity. Some recent theorising about the deeper significance of each new image has been way too involved, Banksy’s support organisation, Pest Control Office, has indicated.
When a goat teetering on a precipice first appeared on Monday near Kew Bridge, in Richmond, southwest London, some thought the goat might be a symbol of humanity’s folly. Others speculated that this striking initial stencil might be a visual pun on the idea of the goat, now standing for “greatest of all time” in popular parlance.
On Tuesday two silhouetted elephant heads popped up, reaching out to each other with their trunks through the bricked up windows of a house in Chelsea. Next came perhaps the most joyous image so far, when a trio of monkeys were revealed on Wednesday, swinging their way across a bridge over Brick Lane in east London.
On Thursday, day four of Banksy’s visual campaign, an outline of a howling lone wolf, painted on to a large satellite dish on a roof in Peckham, was swiftly removed by two masked men with a ladder, who made off with their prize. Yesterday, Banksy’s representative said the theft was nothing to do with them, adding: “We have no knowledge as to the dish’s current whereabouts.”
Friday means fish and chips for many Londoners – and Banksy saw things the same way. So a pair of hungry pelicans appeared above a Walthamstow fish and chip shop on a corner of Pretoria Street, their long beaks snapping at fish.
Banksy, whose closely guarded identity has never been confirmed, works under cover of night with a small team of helpers, and is thought to have been spotted at work occasionally. On Monday at 5am two men inside a cherry picker next to Kew Bridge were filmed as a bearded man in a van operated a hydraulic lifting platform, bearing someone in a large white face mask.
While Banksy’s new menagerie has been springing up across the city, the rescue boat that the artist funds has been working to help endangered asylum seekers to reach safety. The M V Louise Michel is a high speed independent lifeboat that patrols migrant routes in the Mediterranean and which has picked up at least 85 survivors in the last couple of days, taking them safely to Pozzallo, Sicily. On Saturday it was also actively on call, heading for a boat in distress. Five years ago Banksy announced that he would finance the vessel, named after a French feminist anarchist, with the intention of rescuing refugees in difficulty as they fled north Africa.
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In June, at Glastonbury, an inflatable migrant boat created by Banksy was used to crowdsurf during performances by Bristol indie punk band Idles and rapper Little Simz. The Conservative home secretary at the time, James Cleverly, said the artist was “trivialising” small boat crossings and “vile”. Banksy responded at the time by saying the detention of the Louise Michel by Italian authorities at the time was the really “vile and unacceptable” development.
His latest graffiti animals, however, are deliberately light-hearted, like Banksy’s lockdown series The Great British Spraycation of 2020. Banksy’s seaside series also memorably featured chips, with an image of a seagull hovering over oversized “chips” in a skip. He also created a rat relaxing in a deckchair with a cocktail.
Another image from the lockdown campaign made reference to the refugee crisis. It showed three children sitting in a rickety boat made of scrap metal. Above them Banksy had inscribed: “We’re all in the same boat.”
The provenance of that series was confirmed with the release of a three-minute Instagram video clip that revealed the obscured form of the artist, travelling in a beaten-up camper van on a holiday tour that took in Lowestoft in Suffolk and Gorleston, Great Yarmouth, Cromer and King’s Lynn, all in Norfolk. His final London destinations are yet to emerge.