The final section of a wall that held a Banksy mural has been removed from the side of a house.
People in the eastern coastal town of Lowestoft woke up on August 2021 to a giant seagull flying at a rubbish skip spray-painted on a house.
The mural by the world-famous graffiti artist, worth an estimated £3,000,000, helped put the town on the map, the local council said.
First, the skip went. Full of insulation strips to represent chips, officials removed it in a bid to deter fly-tipping.
By February, scaffolding and covers appeared around the privately owned building – but the town mayor stressed that the mural wasn’t going anywhere.
That is until Monday night when the final slab of the three-storey wall was peeled off by a crane and taken away on a large low-loader lorry with police present.
Last month, the top half of the mural on Katwijk Way was removed by builders.
All that’s left now is a gaping hole on the side of the building.
Locals weren’t best pleased by the demolition job, especially as another Banksy piece in town had already been removed.
‘It’s sad to see it go,’ one said of the seagull mural that was a ‘gift to the town’.
The town’s mayor, Alan Green, had previously said builders were just carrying out work to stabilise the wall, not tear the 22-tonne artwork down.
One builder behind the structural removal, Garry Freeman, 52, said the wall section has been taken into storage ‘somewhere in the UK’.
‘The reason we did it at night wasn’t to do it directly,’ the Freeman Brickworks worker said, ‘it was because we had to get the adjacent road closed off.’
A spokesman for East Suffolk Council added: ‘While we are naturally disappointed by the reported removal of the Banksy seagull from the side of a building in Lowestoft, it is ultimately the right of the owner to make decisions about their own property, and we acknowledge that Banksy works, by their nature, may not always be permanent features.
‘We remain grateful for the attention that Banksy has brought to Lowestoft – a town with a burgeoning arts and cultural scene that will continue to go from strength to strength.’
Homeowners Garry and Gokean Coutts had long complained about the mural, saying that its popularity and upkeep were a ‘living nightmare’.
Council officials told them that they had to foot the £40,000 bill to maintain the work by the anonymous street artist, they told The Times on Tuesday.
‘I have had to hire a night watchman to look after it after someone stole part of it and tried to sell it on Facebook,’ Garry said.
‘Another time vandals were caught with a dozen pots of white paint and were apparently going to paint over it.’
The couple are landlords based in Enfield, north London, who rented out the Lowestoft property when the artwork appeared.
The bill to have the mural removed will likely reach £200,000, they said, adding that they are hoping to sell it and have it replaced with a replica.
Modern art dealer John Brandler said the seagull mural could be worth millions – but it’s hard to put a price on what it did and could have done for the community.
‘The seagull is world famous; it would have brought tens of thousands of visitors to the town if not hundreds of thousands,’ he said.
‘An American offered to buy the house and give it to the council free of charge to use for social housing and allow the town to benefit from keeping it – but no one was interested.’
The seagull mural was part of Banksy’s Great British Spraycation series, the political activist’s bid to restore seaside towns that were once tourist hotspots.
Now, Brandler said, this may never happen.
‘The value of the Banksy mural to the town is not the money that changes hands when it’s sold,’ he said.
‘It’s the amount of money which now won’t be brought in over the next 10 years.’
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