An investment property in Bristol with a Banksy artwork on the wall will be auctioned on 20 November.
The building, situated on Stokes Croft in the centre of Bristol, has Banksy’s early work, The Mild Mild West, graffitied on an external wall on the left-hand side of the property.
The artwork, which depicts a teddy bear throwing a Molotov cocktail at police, was drawn in 1999 in response to an event at Winterstoke Road, where riot police used violence against partygoers at a warehouse on the street.
“We did it in daylight, over three days. I held the ladder for him and kept lookout,” says Jim Paine in Banksy’s Bristol, a book by Steve Wright. Paine owned the record shop next door and claims to have encouraged Banksy to produce the artwork, pointing out the empty wall.
“The first day, he painted the wall black. Banksy used car paints – he had a deal with a guy who ran an auto shop. The next day he put the teddy bear in, and then the police. We did the cops last thing that day because that was the most provocative part. The third day, I think, he did the lettering.
“He wasn’t happy with the coppers after doing his first draft, and if you look closely you’ll see he’s adjusted the outlines of the policemen. Banksy’s a perfectionist. I love the way the teddy looks slightly wobbly, slightly ungainly… he looks kinda docile. It’s a simple piece, but there’s so much to read into it.’
The four-storey building is a mixed-use investment property, home to two four-bedroom maisonettes —both HMO licensed and currently vacant— and a barber shop.
The flats were previously let to students for £2,750pcm and £3,000pcm respectively. The shop space has been rented to the barber for several years and will be sold subject to the existing tenancy.
The building’s current owner bought the property for £55,000 in 2000, after Banksy painted the mural. According to Paine’s account, the building had been unoccupied, abandoned and boarded up at the time.
Now, though, with the building due to be auctioned, buyers have the chance to purchase their own Banksy artwork. “It might be one of those situations where you buy a Banksy, and you get an investment property thrown in. Or it could be that somebody looks at it as a pure economic sum and has the Banksy as a bonus. We won’t really know,” says Andrew Morgan, director and auctioneer at Hollis Morgan.
Morgan has sold a Banksy drawing at a charity auction before, and anticipates “enormous interest, certainly in this part of the world, because he’s a local boy”.
Although the work is “exceedingly valuable” and “an integral part of Bristol”, Morgan says that it is difficult to estimate the value that Banksy’s mural adds to the building.
Certainly, the owner of the block of flats in Finsbury Park where Banksy’s tree painting appeared earlier this year estimated that the building could be worth £1.3 million. He had bought it for £400,000 in 2012. “A property is worth what a property is worth,” he told MailOnline. “You know what, if somebody offered me millions and they can have the building and take the flats with it. Feel free.”
In 2021, a Banksy mural depicting a hula-hooping girl was removed from a building in Nottingham and sold to a gallery owner for a “six figure sum”, while Lowestoft Electrical Building was removed from the market the same year after the owner believed it could be worth more than the property.
Conversely, in 2020, a Banksy artwork appeared on the side of a house in Bristol after it had been put up for sale. The sale went ahead, but the owners said that it was not the goldmine some expected. “Not only has it not earned us £5m, as the papers said, it’s actually cost us money to protect it,” they told The Guardian. “We think it should be protected and stay where it is.”
“People have paid absurd sums for properties [with Banksy murals], and people have been known to demolish walls to acquire one that way. It’s even conceivable that that sort of thing might happen,” says Morgan. “I suppose the Banksy is a bonus in this particular instance, but it’s quite conceivable that someone would pay an absolute premium in order to own one.”
The property has been listed with a guide price of £750,000, and will be auctioned online by Hollis Morgan on 20 November. Auction, says Morgan, is the “right route” for the sale, both because it is an investment property, and because there is an “unknown value”.
He believes that the building is likely to appeal to a property investor because of its potential rental yield of £77,000 per year. “[The Banksy] might just be a lucky gain for them, or it could produce international interest…It might turn out with a rich American taking the wall away and rebuilding it with breeze blocks or something,” he says. “Watch this space.”
