This artwork is part of the tour Banksy carried out along the east coast of England in August 2021, which he himself called “A Great British Spraycation”. The artist left around ten pieces in towns along the Suffolk and Norfolk coast, and claimed them on 13 August 2021 with a three minute video staged as if he were a tourist on a caravan holiday.

Luxury Rentals Only is one of the most political pieces in this series, and it sits on the concrete sea wall at East Beach in the Norfolk town of Cromer.

The composition shows hermit crabs. Because these crabs do not produce their own shells, they live by moving into empty shells left behind by other creatures, and when a shell becomes too small, they have to find a new one. Banksy turns this biological fact directly into a comment on housing. On the wall, three crabs without shells face one crab that has a shell. The one with a shell is holding a small sign: “LUXURY RENTALS ONLY”. Empty shells are scattered around, so housing does actually exist, it just cannot be reached.

It is no accident that this message was left in Cromer. England’s coastal towns are among the places hit hardest by the second home and holiday letting market: local people often cannot find a home to rent in the town where they were born, while the same properties are let to tourists by the week during summer. Banksy does not discuss this process, he simply translates it into the language of crabs, and that translation is understood faster than any set of statistics.

What happened to the piece afterwards fits strangely well with its own message. Rather than removing it or moving it to a museum, the local council chose to leave it exactly where it was, so it would only go once the sea took it. A protective coating was applied after an attempted act of vandalism in 2022, but salt air and winter storms did their work regardless. In 2024, visitors reported that the piece had “faded significantly”; today, only ghostly traces are said to remain. While many other pieces in the series were removed and placed under protection, this one is still slowly disappearing on its own wall.

Luxury Rentals Only shows Banksy at his best: reducing a complicated economic mechanism to a single visual joke a child could understand, and leaving that joke on the very wall where the problem is actually playing out.