Anonymous British street artist Banksy unveiled his latest work in the London suburb of Bayswater on Monday – two days after an identical graffiti appeared on Oxford Street in the heart of the city's bustling shopping district.
The black and white mural, which was posted on an Instagram page generally considered to be Banksy's official account, depicts two children in winter jackets, hats and wellington boots lying on their backs, looking and pointing upwards towards a red light atop a crane rising up in the background.
The image appears on the side of a dilapidated-looking house just above a garage, making it look as if the children are lying on the corrugated-iron roof, next to a skip which is overflowing with rubbish and discarded furniture and kitchen appliances.
The same motif appeared several miles away in central London over the weekend – as early as Saturday morning, according to local Instagram users, who wondered why Banksy didn't share that version on his official channel.
On that mural, on a small wall at the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, the children appear to be pointing up at London's controversial Centrepoint tower — a luxury 34-storey apartment block built in the 1970s which was once occupied by activists protesting against the lack of affordable housing in a city which still has a growing homelessness problem.
According to the latest statistics, around 210,000 people are forced to sleep rough on the streets of the British capital, almost half of them children — including on Oxford Street, where Christmas shoppers are replaced by the homeless once the hundreds of shops have shut their doors for the night.
"I think it's very telling that people are rushing past this mural in the same way that they rush past the homeless people they don't want to see," Banksy fan and sketcher Daniel Lloyd-Morgan told German public broadcaster Tagesschau. "I think that's what Banksy wants to draw our attention to."
Other passers-by had different interpretations.
"If it is a Banksy, then maybe he's trying to say: look at the city, admire its sights," opined one to Tagesschau. "Maybe it's a fallen soldier whose inner child is showing him the way to heaven," suggested another.
On Instagram, one user commented under Banksy's post: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" — quoting the character of Lord Darlington in Oscar Wilde's 1892 play, Lady Windermere's Fan.
Another pointed out the timing of the two murals which coincided with the winter solstice on Sunday, December 21, the shortest and darkest day of the year in the northern hemisphere.
One wrote simply: "All we want for Christmas is Banksy."