February 18, 2021 

Banksy's mural in Nottingham. Courtesy of Banksy. 

A Banksy artwork of a girl hula-hooping a tyre has been removed from a wall in Nottingham after a gallery purchased the piece. The slab of brick was cut out on Wednesday (February 17) morning from a wall on Rothesay Avenue. Gallery owner John Brandler told the BBC he paid a "six-figure sum" for the piece, and wanted to help preserve it, as well as put it on display. 

The gallery owner, John Brandler, has collected a number of Banksy’s pieces, including Season’s Greetings, an image of a child tasting “snowflakes” falling from a dumpster fire, that the artist painted in the polluted city of Port Talbot in late 2018. The dealer put the work on display just across town, at the Street Art Museum in Wales.. He said, "If I hadn't bought it and removed it, in two years' time there wouldn't have been a Banksy there at all” Mr Brandler said he planned to feature the piece in a street exhibition later this year at the Moyse's Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. The show will also include Banksy’s Heart Boy, a 2009 mural of a boy painting a graffiti heart that was salvaged before the demolition of a London building. The work was purchased by Amsterdam’s Moco Museum in 2016 and has never been exhibited in London, according to the gallery.

Two residents remembered when the piece was first seen and there were queues of people wanting to get a glimpse of the art. Banksy painted the mural on October 13 of last year, chaining a bent bike with a missing back wheel next to it in an apparent reference the Raleigh Bicycle Company, which has called Nottingham home since it was founded in 1887. The artist claimed the work as his own several days later in an Instagram post.

The wall in Rothesay Avenue has now been boarded up. Photo: Dan Golstein

The owner of the building on which the mural appeared, who has chosen to remain anonymous, told NottinghamshireLive they had not wanted to keep it. They said they had tried to donate it locally but “discussions with a number of local organisations, charities and national bodies” had not led anywhere as “none were able to commit to taking ownership of the art”. Local residents expressed sadness that the mural, which attracted queues of people when it was first created, had been taken out of the city.

Banksy has been outspoken in his disapproval of the sale of his street art, and his company, Pest Control, reportedly told the Nottingham Project, the city’s rejuvenation board, that he wished that the bicycle artwork would remain in place.