Visitors to Scotland’s largest city are used to seeing its most famous statue wearing a traffic cone.
But the Duke of Wellington memorial outside the city’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) on Queen Street has been given a surprise new look — by a street artist dubbed the Scottish Banksy.
The makeover by the Rebel Bear is a statue of a pigeon reading a newspaper with a traffic cone on its head sitting on top of the duke.
The pigeon gets its own cone and special edition newspaper to read
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JEFF J MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES
JEFF J MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES
Posting pictures of their work on Instagram, the Rebel Bear wrote: “The dignified and undignified beasts. Located: well, youse know where.”
Wellington’s head is topped with a dollop of white pigeon poop underneath the bird’s backside.
The Rebel Bear makes political street art out of Glasgow’s town centre. In August they unveiled a mural of a child trying to climb a broken ladder towards the Hope Street road sign, carrying a Palestinian flag.
Last month they were spotted painting a large mural on a wall on Washington Street while wearing a bear suit.
The pigeon’s newspaper is titled The Daily Dropping and is complete with news and sports sections.
The headlines are “Seagull Gang Caught”, “Park bench poop crisis deepens” and — in relation to a pigeon race in the sports section — “Cliffy wins by a beak”.
Wellington’s cone had a propeller added to mark the end of Banksy’s exhibition in 2023
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The Instagram post about the makeover was liked more than 2,400 times and has drawn more than 100 comments. Users called the artwork “brilliant”, “absolutely phenomenal”, and “superb”. Others called for it to remain as a permanent feature, instead of the traditional cone.
The Rebel Bear has made another artwork inspired by the Duke of Wellington before. In 2023 a painting in Glasgow’s Argyle Street showed a rat sitting on a mock-up of the duke statue. It had a traffic cone above its head and was raising it as if tipping its hat.
The painting emerged during Banksy’s Cut and Run exhibition at the GoMa. The artist revealed his exhibition was at the Royal Exchange Square venue due to his love of the statue and its add-on.
At the time, the Rebel Bear shared a photo of his own work on Instagram and wrote: “A tip of the hat to welcome the man himself, Banksy, coming to Glasgow.”
The equestrian statue of Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, was sculpted by the Italian-born French artist Carlo Marochetti and went up in 1844.