Banksy creates coronavirus-related artwork on London Underground carriage

Banksy has sprayed the inside of a London Underground train carriage with messages about the spread of coronavirus.

The street artist uploaded a 59-second video captioned “If you don’t mask – you don’t get” to his Instagram and YouTube pages on Tuesday afternoon.

It begins with a laptop playing PA Video footage showing the London Underground being deep cleaned in May.

Banksy, wearing a white boiler suit, mask, goggles, blue gloves and an orange hi-viz jacket with the message “stay safe” printed on it, is then seen posing as a Transport for London worker.

He makes his way to a Circle Line train, carrying a yellow pump action spray bottle and stencils in cardboard on board.

As an announcement states that “the next station is Baker Street”, the artist sprays blue droplets from the face of one of his famous rats, which has been stencilled on the carriage.

Banksy indicates for another masked passenger to move back, before stencilling a rat using a blue face mask as a parachute.

Another rat has a blue mask over its face, while one holds a bottle of hand sanitiser.

The video finishes with a message sprayed on the wall of a Tube station reading: “I get lockdown” with the doors of the Tube carriage closing to reveal the message “But I get up again”.

Chumbawamba’s song Tubthumping – also known as I Get Knocked Down – plays as the doors touch together.

There are two rats, one on each of the carriage’s doors, looking at each other.

Banksy, from Bristol, has created a number of artworks during the coronavirus lockdown.

In April, he created a series of rats causing mayhem in his bathroom and posted the caption: “My wife hates it when I work from home.”

Later that month, a large face mask was placed on his world-famous piece The Girl With The Pierced Eardrum on Bristol harbourside.

An artwork entitled Game Changer, showing an NHS nurse as a superhero toy, went on display at Southampton General Hospital in May.

In June, Banksy posted a piece inspired by Black Lives Matter with a caption, part of which read: “People of colour are being failed by the system.”

The following day, a statue of slave trader Edward Colston was toppled by protesters in Bristol and thrown into the harbour during a Black Lives Matter march.

Banksy posted a sketch showing his idea for the empty plinth – retrieving the statue from the water, putting it back on the plinth with cables around its neck and life-size bronze statues of protesters pulling it down.

He finished the caption by stating: “A famous day commemorated.”