Crowds booed as a new Banksy artwork of a stretching cat on an empty, distressed advertising billboard was removed in north-west London hours after it was revealed.
The elusive street artist confirmed he was behind the piece - a silhouette of a black cat with an upturned tail stretching out its body - by posting a photo on Instagram on Saturday .
Hours later, men who said they were hired from a “contracting company” turned up in Cricklewood to take the hoarding down for safety reasons.
A contractor, who only wanted to give his name as Marc, said they were going to pull the boarding down on Monday and replace it, but the removal had been brought forward to Saturday in case someone “rips it down and leaves it unsafe”.
The owner of the billboard has told police he will donate it to an art gallery, an officer at the scene told the PA news agency.
Police taped off the path in front of the hoarding as about 50 people gathered to take pictures.
Locals have spoken of their dismay at seeing the artwork removed.
Carol Reeman, 64, said: “This is Cricklewood, this is our Banksy. You can’t even enjoy it for the whole day before someone wanted to take it down.
“You would wait for a lifetime for a Banksy to come into our neighbourhood. Cricklewood’s on the map.”
Josette Gerlier, 79, who travelled from Kensington to see the artwork, described the removal of the billboard as “madness”.
A crowd of about 50 people, including a number of journalists, watched as three contractors stood within the police cordon.
The artwork is the sixth to be unveiled by the Bristol-based artist this week in London, in what appears to be a new animal-themed collection, after he previously unveiled a goat, elephants, monkeys, a wolf and pelicans.
The cat design is the second piece this week to be removed, after a painting of a wolf howling on a satellite dish was taken off the roof of a shop in Peckham, south London, less than an hour after it was unveiled.
A group of partially masked men were pictured climbing up a ladder and grabbing the dish before carrying it away.
“I was walking down around 1pm and saw three guys nicking it,” passerby Tom Kellow said, adding: “They had a ladder. There was one guy on the roof and the other two were watching the ladder.
“They saw me filming and it got a bit tetchy. One gave me a kick in the side and another tried to throw my phone on the roof. Luckily it hit a tree and came back down again.
“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.”
A statement from the Metropolitan Police said: “We were called to reports of a stolen satellite dish containing artwork at 1.52pm on Thursday August 8 in Rye Lane, Peckham.
“There have been no arrests. Enquiries continue.”
A spokesman for Banksy said the artist is neither connected to nor endorses the theft of the wolf design, and that they have “no knowledge as to the dish’s current whereabouts”.
The first piece of graffiti in Banksy’s new animal-themed series, which was announced on Monday, is near Kew Bridge in south-west London and shows a goat with rocks falling down below it, just above where a CCTV camera is pointed.
On Tuesday the artist added silhouettes of two elephants with their trunks stretched towards each other on the side of a building near Chelsea, west London.
This was followed by three monkeys looking as though they were swinging underneath a bridge over Brick Lane, near a vintage clothing shop in the popular east London market street, not far from Shoreditch High Street.
On Friday he revealed his fifth design, an artwork which features pelicans pinching fish from a London chip shop sign.
The piece, featuring two bird silhouettes, was discovered overnight on the exterior wall of Bonners Fish Bar on Pretoria Avenue, Walthamstow.
