Banksy's #Dismaland spreads to London

arms fair poster

Photo courtesy of Jayenne Montana: www.twitter.com/_jayenne

For the last few weeks, street art icon Banksy's theme-park parody Dismaland has lured thousands from across the world to the small English seaside town of Weston-super-mare (you can read our review here). But now you don't need to travel so far west to get a slice of the Dismaland experience – if you're quick.

arms fair poster

Artists have broken into bus shelter poster casings to place the protest artwork

In the last 24 hours, more than 300 posters by guerrilla artists featured at Dismaland have appeared across the capital's train carriages and bus stops to mark the first day of the DSEI Arms Fair at the ExCel Centre in London Docklands.

arms fair poster

The posters are protesting against an arms fair being held at the ExCel Centre

This includes bus stop posters by Jonathan Barnbrook, best known for his controversial cover art for David Bowie's recent Next Day album.

A group called 'Special Patrols Group' have been using their own 'Ad Space Hack Packs' to open the poster casings and switch out adverts for their parody posters. The group have sold over 2,000 of these tool packs at Dismaland.

One of the posters, by @darren_cullen, which went up this morning

One of the posters, by @darren_cullen, which went up this morning

A spokesperson for Transport for London told London 24: "This is not an authorised advert. It is fly-posting and therefore an act of vandalism which we take extremely seriously. We have instructed our contractor to remove any found on our network."

arms fair poster

Transport for London are treating the posters as vandalism

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Tom May

Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.