A glass police emergency call box in central London looks like a piranha tank. It is the seventh in a series of works by graffiti artist Banksy.
The elusive artist claimed the work as his own, showing it in a post on his Instagram account at 1 p.m. on Sunday.
The fish depicted on the police emergency call box is stylistically different from the six previous silhouette designs that Banksy has claimed as his work in succession over the past few days.
One of the designs, showing a wolf on a satellite dish, was removed by suspected thieves. Another, showing a stretching cat on a blank billboard, was removed by contractors. The piranha design can be seen as a commentary on how previous designs were received.
Two City of London police officers were seen inspecting Banksy’s new work before taking photographs.
An official told PA Media news agency they had been asked to inspect the artwork after it was seen on CCTV and were waiting to hear what would be done about it.
Banksy’s Instagram account has posted a new animal artwork every day for the past seven days. These included silhouettes of a goat, elephants, monkeys, a wolf, pelicans and a cat.
On Saturday, an image showing a stretching cat on a damaged and empty billboard was removed from its location in northwest London, hours after it was discovered.
The crowd booed as the billboard was taken down in Cricklewood by three men who said they had been hired by a contracting company to take down the billboard for safety reasons.
Hours after Banksy confirmed it was his design, crowds from across London gathered to see the work before the men arrived.
A contractor who wanted to identify himself only as Marc said they would remove and replace the billboard on Monday, but the removal had been brought forward to Saturday in case someone tore it down and made it unsafe.
At the request of the police, a bulletin board was initially used to cover most of the cat, to prevent people from walking in front of traffic on the road.
The owner of the billboard told police that he would donate it to an art gallery.
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The cat-themed artwork was the second piece of art to be removed during the week, following a painting of a howling wolf on a satellite dish that was ripped off the roof of a shop in Peckham, south London, less than an hour after it was unveiled.
“It’s a great pity that we can’t have nice things, and it’s a pity that it couldn’t last longer than an hour,” said one witness.
The first of Banksy’s animal-themed graffiti series announced on Monday is located near Kew Bridge in southwest London and shows a goat with stones falling beneath it, just above a security camera.
On Tuesday, the artist added the silhouettes of two elephants with their trunks stretched out towards each other to the side of a building in Chelsea, west London.
This was followed by three monkeys appearing to swing under a bridge over Brick Lane in east London.
The fifth image, showing pelicans stealing fish from the sign of a fish and chip shop in Walthamstow, north-east London, was unveiled on Friday.
