Banksy's latest surprise for Londoners involves kids in winter clothes, a crane that looks a lot like a Christmas tree, and a mystery twin across town. The elusive street artist confirmed a new mural in Bayswater on Monday by posting it to his official Instagram account. The black-and-white piece, painted on the side of an older building on Queen's Mews, shows two bundled-up children, lying on their backs, pointing toward the sky, AFP reports.
In a wider shot, they appear to be perched atop a corrugated garage roof, with an overflowing dumpster nearby and a tall crane looming behind, capped by a red light that reads, to many eyes, as a minimalist holiday tree. Complicating the picture: a near-identical mural appeared under the Centre Point building off Tottenham Court Road, this time with the pair of children looking up at the London skyscraper instead. Both works quickly drew crowds and a flurry of online theorizing over whether they were genuine Banksys. By late afternoon, only the Bayswater version had made it onto the artist's social media.
Sources tell the BBC that the mural at Centre Point is also a genuine Banksy, apparently placed there to make a statement about child homelessness. The building, now luxury apartments, was the site of housing protests during the many years it sat empty. "Everybody is having a good time but there are a lot of children who are not having a good time at Christmas," artist Daniel Lloyd-Morgan tells the BBC. He notes that most people are "ignoring" the mural. "It's a busy area," he says. "Quite poignant that people aren't stopping. They walk past homeless people and they don't see them lying on the street."
Banksy, whose identity remains unconfirmed, has been particularly active in London this year. In September, he drew attention with a work outside the Royal Courts of Justice showing a judge raising a gavel over a protester holding a blood-marked sign, a pointed nod to the UK's tougher stance on demonstrations. That mural was quickly removed.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
