Gutted Really wanted to go and see that and never got round to going.

does anyone have a photo? i am actually that lazy that i haven't bothered walking the 5 minutes it would take me to get there... there was some crap bubble writing that appeared under it a couple of weeks ago after someone had lovingly restored it removing the silver writing here: www.flickr.com/photos/jadeeey/2326912805/

such a shame. my walk up church street won't be the same now.

any one seen the gold barcode image @ old street roundabout

is this a new banksy

Yeah saw that barcode the other week, deffo not, it's really hard to make out from the road.

What on earth have they done to the banksy piece in stoke newington!? Looks rough as! I'll have to try and get a look before it disappears completely!

It's almost as if they were going to paint over it and someone shouted "you do realise that's a Banksy you're painting over" so they decided to go around it!!

What a shame , great piece too, you would think with all the recent hype surrpound B that it would have been left . hmmm Tw@ts indeed

Looks fucking shit. What gives them the right to paint someone elses building.

Surely that is like someone walking up to my houes and painting over it ?. how or why is this possible .??

True true , see i can understand if it was a eyesore, (not the artist) but this was a nice piece looked great, And defo added something to the area , Real shame that it is gone , id be angry if it was my building , but also i probably would have tried to have it pretected by now , covered in perspex , i know this is not as was intended but if precausions are not taken then things get defaced removed etc etc ,,

Here's what it used to look like:

I agree it a shame esp as its on Private property however after reading that story
im sure that Banksy will be drawn back to that nice clean wall as moth is to a light bulb.

Trouble is everyone will be watching that wall like a hawk looking for any scaffolding of activity. Not gonna be easy for Banksy or any other artists to do a piece there without being noticed.

i reckon it'll be pretty impossible for anyone to do anything there without being noticed, church street is busy 24/7

www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/03/banksy-artwork-painted-over-hackney

Council officials have painted over a Banksy graffiti sketch that was used by the band Blur as the cover artwork for their 2003 single Crazy Beat.

The artwork – a cartoon of the royal family waving from a balcony – had been left untouched on the side of a block of flats in Stoke Newington, east London, for eight years before Hackney council intervened last week.

Officials removed the sketch by Banksy – whose works have sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds – as his largest exhibition to date, in Bristol, prepared to close. The exhibition has attracted over 300,000 visitors since 13 June, raising £45,000 in museum donations, and is estimated to have been worth £10m to the local economy.

Banksy vs Bristol Museum featured more than 100 works of art. The notoriously secretive artist was reported to have been secretly adding new installations to the exhibition by night.

A Stoke Newington blogger known only as Kris broke the news of the artwork's removal.

She reported that council workers said they had told their employers about the importance of the artwork. "We knew it was a Banksy, love. It's a Stoke Newington landmark; we know that. We told them, but they wouldn't listen," wrote Kris.

The owner of the building, Sophie Attrill, told the Hackney Gazette that she was devastated when she saw the wall being painted.

"I looked out the window and saw what they were doing, so I ran downstairs and I told them to stop," said Attrill.Hackney council said it tried to contact Attrill before ordering the artwork to be painted over, but notices asking her to remove or cover up the piece had not reached her address due to the Land Registry having the incorrect contact details.

Alan Laing, the Hackney council cabinet member for neighbourhoods, said the council removed all graffiti regardless of artistic value.

"Hackney council does not make a judgment call on whether graffiti is art or not, our task is to keep Hackney's streets clean. We made four attempts to contact the owner of the property to inform her of our intention to remove the graffiti," said Laing.

"We are now speaking with her about how to resolve the issue."

It's not the first time Banksy has had his street art removed by authorities. In October last year Westminster city council removed a mural from Newman Street in central London after the deputy council leader, Robert Davis, said keeping it would be "condoning" graffiti.

In 2007 a piece showing a monkey preparing to blow up a bunch of bananas at Waterloo station in London was painted over by staff.

So do you think Banksy will go back and give them something new? As they seem happy for something to stay and is well placed.