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Bristol Post
Bristol Post
National
Tristan Cork

Banksy filmed as he sprays London tube train with coronavirus message

Bristol street artist Banksy has covered the inside of a London Underground carriage with a message about the spread of coronavirus.

The enigmatic graffiti artist posted a video on his Instagram account showing how he gained access to a tube train and sprayed his familiar rats sneezing all over the inside of the carriages.

The artist appears prominently in the video himself, donning a mask and PPE suit, before carrying a paint sprayer and stencils onto the Circle Line train.

UPDATE: The artwork has now been removed - see what TFL said here.

At one point in the video, which Banksy entitled 'If you don't mask you don't get', he is approached by a fellow traveller, and waves them away from the area where he sprayed his graffiti.

The video ends with a message sprayed on the far side of a tube tunnel which, when read with a second message on closing doors in the foreground, reads: "I get lockdown, but I get up again", as the video plays the 1997 Chumbawumba hit Tubthumping.

It's the first public output from the Bristolian artist since his suggestion last month of what should be placed on the plinth of the statue of Edward Colston.

Banksy's latest work sprayed on the inside of a London Underground tube carriage with messages about the spread of coronavirus (PA)

He suggested, with an illustration of his idea, the statue of the 18th century slave trader should be put back up on the plinth in the centre of Bristol, but with more statues around it of the protesters pulling it down.

The artist had a quiet lockdown, and revealed he'd had to resort to covering his own bathroom in his graffiti because he wasn't allowed out, before backing the Black Lives Matter protests before the Colston Statue was toppled in Bristol.

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