At one o’clock in the afternoon this Thursday, the British artist Banksy published an image on his Instagram in which announced its new creation, a wolf howling at a satellite dish on a London rooftop that didn’t last an hour before it was stolen.

Instantly, the neighbors of the Peckham districtsoutheast of the capital, identified the location of the double photograph, one at night and one during the day, as a shop on Rye Lane, one of the main avenues, and went to see the work in person just a few minutes after the announcement on social media, without knowing that they would be the lucky few who would get to see it with their own eyes.

The smell of spray paint still permeated the air when the first curious people, like José Torres, an Asturian who has lived in London for a decade, began to make their pilgrimage to the place chosen by Banksy to place his creation and who said that he had the artist’s alerts activated so that his device would notify him when there was a new publication.

“It’s just a matter of time before they steal it”“It won’t last a day there,” commented another young man as he dismantled his drone to film the new ‘Banksy’ and recalled that the last time the artist had intervened in Peckham, in December 2023, his work, a STOP sign with military planes in reference to ‘stopping wars’, was also stolen a few hours later by a man.

And the prediction materialized almost immediately when, at 13:47 British time, a group of hooded men came running with a metal ladder, placed it on the wall of the premises and one of them climbed up to the roof with the aim of killing him.take up the satellite dish containing the Banksy painting, before the stunned gaze of passers-by, who remained silent as they watched the robbery being committed.

No one was surprised that they were going to take the work, and no one did anything to stop it. to the young man with balaclava who managed to tear off the satellite dish and, with the help of his accomplices, in thirty seconds they took down the piece of the wolf and ran away with it along the avenue. It was simply a robbery that had been announced and, 47 minutes later, it had already been committed.

Since the beginning of the week, the graffiti artist has kept all Londoners in suspense with his works, after unveiling four new paintings for four consecutive days, including this latest one, in different locations in the British capital, all of them featuring animals, in a collection that some have already dubbed “London Zoo” and it is not known how many more paintings it will contain.

The enigmatic artist, whose identity is unknown, He confirms the authorship of his works with a post on social media, without any title or additional information, and leaves the rest to the imagination of his 12 million followers who try to unravel the meanings behind the paintings of the British artist, characterized by incorporating social criticism into his art.

“He is always reminding us of very basic things that we are missing out on in our day to day lives with our busy and somewhat where we are transforming. “I think it brings us back to something more natural and more related to our essence,” Torres said.

This new “animal” series started this Monday with the painting of a mountain goat on the edge of a cliff with a surveillance camera pointed at it, and continued with two elephants looking at each other through two boarded-up windows, three monkeys hanging from a bridge at a subway station and, now, with this wolf that, unfortunately, will no longer be able to howl at the London sky.