Earlier this week saw the appearance of some new stencil work in East London close to Hackney Downs overland station. As with any other new stencil work on the street the name of Banksy always rings out and twitter was awash with talk of a possible new Banksy piece. Even the local paper the Hackney Gazette got involved, running a story on Monday with the stencil pictured above and the possiblility that it may be the work of Banksy! Hookedblog headed up to Andre Street yesterday morning to get some pictures of the piece. We were obviously not the first there taking photos as Ismail Nas owner of garage space was trying to get us to pay £10 to take a picture of his wall!



Most  streetart / Banksy enthusiasts will know from the photos that this is not a Banksy piece, so you might be wondering who the artist is? We suspect it's the work of  Irish stencil artist Solus, having seen some of his handwork on a recent visit to Dublin. We have had a dig around and found this Solus image below taken by A Visual Feast, of what looks like an earlier version/edition of the stencil above  in Rathmines, Dublin. Looks like a match to us.



Also spotted was this second piece by the artist also in Hackney located opposite Hackney Down station.

UPDATE:
It turns out were in incorrect in thinking that this was the work of Irish artist Solus, it has been pointed out to us that it's the work of JPS, a UK stencil artist. Both of these stencil images have previously appeared on the streets of Weston along the seafront here and here. We suspect that both Solus and JPS have used this same image on which to base their stencils, a negative side effect of using Google image search for your work!