Londoners are planning their own version of the viral stunt that saw Chicagoans try to push Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate, the sculpture known as the Bean, seven inches to the left. A public listing on the platform Partiful invites people to gather on Saturday to move the Marble Arch, the 19th-century triumphal arch designed by John Nash, by the same 17.78 centimetres.

The Chicago attempt failed, largely because the Bean weighs 110 tons, but the spectacle spread widely online and the joke has now crossed the Atlantic. The London listing plays the premise straight, noting that the top floor of the Marble Arch was once used for incarceration and that people could still be trapped inside. A representative of the artist Stuart Semple, who has clashed with Kapoor before over questions such as paint colour, told Ocula that Londoners supported the Chicago bean-pushers and were planning to push the Arch to send a clear message that the man supposedly in the Bean must be freed — and to prove to Chicago that moving a monument is possible, in the hope of inspiring another attempt.

The Bean-pushing phenomenon has been driven by social media. The Instagram account @Maninabean, created in 2025, first posted on 28 July that year with a paper cutout of a man inside a bean and the caption "HE IS IN THERE", and on Monday described itself as a coalition of non-violent, like-minded individuals commending action to free the man.

Whether anyone turns up on Saturday, and what the police make of a crowd trying to shift a fixed piece of masonry at one of London's busiest junctions, remains to be seen. The copycat is the latest sign of how quickly a piece of public art can become the centre of a participatory internet joke, with Kapoor's 2006 sculpture in Chicago's Millennium Park long a magnet for crowds and selfies, and now a stage for a collective prank with an international sequel.