Crowd boos as Banksy's latest artwork removed hours after being unveiled

Contractors have been booed by crowds as they removed Banksy’s latest artwork on the same day it was put up.

People expressed their unhappiness with the decision to remove the elusive street artist’s latest piece – a silhouette of a stretching cat – on Saturday evening.

The image had been put up on an empty, distressed advertising hoarding in Edgware Road, Cricklewood, northwest London, and confirmed by Banksy earlier in the day.

It was the sixth in a new set of animal images Banksy has revealed this week.

The creature, stretching out its body with its shoulders down and its hips and tail in the air in classic feline fashion, joins an ibex goat, elephants, monkeys, a howling wolf and pelicans, also revealed this week as Banksy pieces dotted across the city.

One contractor, who only gave his name as Marc, had said earlier they were going to pull the billboard down on Monday anyway and replace it but it was brought forward to Saturday in case someone “rips it down and leaves it unsafe”.

He told the PA news agency he would store the artwork as he had been told “to keep it in case he [Banksy] wants it”.

But if it was not collected, he said, “it’ll go in a skip”.

However, the billboard’s owner told police he will donate it to an art gallery, an officer at the scene told PA.

A black board was used to cover the majority of the cat on the billboard at the request of the police, who wanted to stop people walking in the road in front of traffic to take pictures and videos.

Police taped off the path in front of the billboard.

Earlier this week on Monday, a goat with rocks falling down below it, just above a CCTV camera, was announced by Banksy, located near Kew Bridge in southwest London, kicking off the new animal-themed series.

In nearby Chelsea, silhouettes of two elephants with their trunks stretched towards each other on the side of a building were confirmed as Banksy pieces the following day.

On Wednesday, the street artist revealed he had put three monkeys appearing to swing from a train bridge over Brick Lane in east London.

On Friday, there were pelicans pinching fish from a chip shop sign in Walthamstow, northeast London, a day after a wolf howling on a satellite dish was confirmed in Peckham, south London, and promptly stolen.

Three masked men removed the dish with the wolf artwork less than an hour after it was revealed.

A witness told the PA news agency that he filmed them, prompting one of the trio to throw his phone on a roof.

The man said: “It’s a great shame we can’t have nice things and it’s a shame it couldn’t have lasted more than an hour.”

No arrests have been made, the Metropolitan Police said in a statement.

A spokesman for Banksy, whose identity is a secret, said he had nothing to do with the theft, and had no idea where the satellite dish was.

Read more from Sky News:
Adele tells fans she’s engaged
Cruel summer for arts festival

Banksy was recently criticised by former home secretary James Cleverly, who said the artwork he created for Glastonbury Festival was “trivialising” small boat crossings and “vile”.

The artist had said he was the person behind an inflatable boat filled with migrant dummies which had been crowdsurfed at the music festival in June, during performances by Bristol indie punk band Idles and rapper Little Simz.