Something new appeared on Waterloo Place this week. A sculpture of a suited figure marching forward off a plinth, one hand raised to carry a flag whose billowing fabric entirely obscures the face beneath it. The artwork was spotted on Wednesday in St James’s, one of central London’s most historic stretches of public space. The word Banksy has been scrawled onto the base of the plinth. No official confirmation has followed, at least not yet.
Waterloo Place is a choice location. The area is dense with monuments to British imperial self-regard, among them statues of Edward VII and Florence Nightingale, and the Crimean War Memorial, with the gilded figure of Athena presiding over the façade of the Athenaeum Club nearby. To insert an anonymous suited figure, blindfolded by its own flag and stepping into the void, into that particular constellation of bronze worthies is a gesture whose meaning is not difficult to parse. A politician, or perhaps simply power in the abstract, was rendered sightless by nationalist symbolism and was walking confidently toward its own undoing. If it is Banksy, it is consistent with the register he has occupied for the past several years.
Banksy typically claims his works through Instagram, and no such post had appeared at the time of writing. The signature on the plinth introduces its own uncertainty. His recent London murals, a series that has appeared with notable frequency over the past year or so, were not signed, which makes the presence of a signature here either significant or deliberately misleading, depending on your level of scepticism. Both readings are available.
His recent activity in London has been sketchy. In September last year, a mural appeared on the Royal Courts of Justice depicting a protester on the ground, a blood-spattered placard in hand, while a judge loomed overhead, wielding a gavel. December brought an image in Bayswater of two children lying on the ground, an image whose quieter register made it no less pointed. Before that, in 2024, he created what amounted to an animal trail across the capital, a sequence of works featuring a goat, elephants, a gorilla, monkeys, piranhas, a rhinoceros, and pelicans, each appearing overnight and subsequently confirmed on his social media. The London focus of recent years represents a shift for an artist whose reputation was built on interventions distributed across the globe, and the concentration of work in a single city gives it a cumulative force that individual pieces cannot achieve on their own.
The new sculpture carries an obvious art historical reference. In 2004, Banksy installed The Drinker on Shaftesbury Avenue, a figure derived from Rodin’s The Thinker repositioned in a posture of collapse rather than contemplation. It was removed shortly after it appeared, which is the usual fate of his three-dimensional interventions in public space. Whether the Waterloo Place sculpture will survive longer, given that it occupies a formal plinth in one of the city’s most closely managed public areas, remains to be seen.
What is consistent across all of these works is the covert installation, gradual public discovery and eventual confirmation on Instagram. The subsequent scramble for interpretation has set the internet on fire. The works are designed to be found rather than unveiled, to reward the pedestrian who happens upon them before the official apparatus of attribution catches up. That quality of surprise is part of what has sustained Banksy’s cultural presence across more than two decades, alongside a political instinct that has remained sharp even as the art world’s relationship to his work has grown steadily more complicated.
Waterloo Place, for those unfamiliar with the geography, sits just above the ICA on The Mall, a short distance from Buckingham Palace. The suited figure now stands among the generals, monarchs, and nurses of the British commemorative tradition, walking off its plinth and into nothing, its face completely hidden. Whether Banksy created it or not, the image is powerful.