What happened to Liverpool’s five Banksys?

The Never liked this Banksy rat mural is a sight to behold. Or it was — standing in a car park on Rumford Street, there’s little more to see here than empty fag packets and chipped paint. I kick a can around, looking for the remnants of one of Banksy’s famed works. There’s nothing. Etched in the wall are two words: “Bankies gone”.

I’m on a tour of Liverpool’s street art, armed with a list of prime locations given to me by anonymous street artist John D’oh. He’s been painting for well over a decade, creating murals across both Bristol and Liverpool alongside his artistic partner in crime, Silent Bill. Who’s that? Little is known about Silent Bill other than that he grew up in Merseyside and still lives here. His artworks, if you’re lucky enough to catch a glimpse before they’re painted over, decorate much of the Baltic Triangle; Jamaica Street is adorned with one of my personal favourites: the You Can Rob A Bank monkey mural. 

But perhaps Bill is best known as the originator of an international secret society. Formed in 2012, the Secret Society Of Super Villain Artists (SSOSVA) brings together creatives across the world, united by a love of street art and rebellion. Their branded stickers can be found plastered on walls as far as Italy and Mexico, and the group often host pop-up events to raise money for charity. 

Crucially, Silent Bill claims to be the real hand behind the aforementioned Never liked this Banksy rat on Rumford Street, which has been widely credited to Banksy and sold as such. Bill’s gang of supervillains seem to be sure of this too — I call up one of the group’s members, an artist known as X, and she tells me the painting is “Bill all over”. 

X explains she’s seen the story of Bill’s rat mural on the secret society’s social media pages. It was removed a few years ago (despite much rumour and suspicion, no one knows by whom), resurfacing during a televised auction this year where it sold for £250,000, despite doubts about its provenance.

The question of whether or not the piece was an authentic Banksy has enthralled the press in recent weeks. Silent Bill has become a minor star, his name mentioned by the Guardian and the Echo, who wondered whether the buyer — well-known Banksy dealer Robin Barton — had been duped.

There’s only one way to start unpicking this, and that’s through Silent Bill himself. I expect a convoluted process, cutting and glueing a letter from magazine clippings that I could slip under an unmarked door in the Baltic in an attempt to summon him. The Secret Society’s website suggests one of the only ways to contact them is via smoke signals. In the end, though, I exchanged a few messages with him over Instagram and then got him on the phone. 

Despite the name, Bill isn’t one for long pauses. He’s animated, funny and charming as he digs into the drama. “It was big news when they removed it,” he says. “If you ask anyone in the street art game, they aren’t impressed.” They believe — unsurprisingly —  that such works are, by definition, intended for the street. It’s an egalitarian ethos; art should belong to the people, and pieces etched into the walls of a city should stay there rather than being sold for the benefit of champagne-swigging art dealers. But the hoo-ha around the dubious removal of Bill’s artwork isn’t where our story ends. It’s not even where it begins. Are you ready? Strap in. 

“You need to look into that museum,” Bill tells me.

First, though, some context: this all started in 2013, when Banksy’s mural, White Rat, was removed from the side of a Liverpool pub by international "lifestyle and concierge services" company The Sincura Group. Despite a fair amount of digging, it’s unclear to me exactly how Sincura were allowed to remove the various artworks mentioned in this story, but their stated aim with the White Rat was to restore it to its former glory after years of wear and tear. Three years later, Banksy’s Love Plane mural was also removed, with a note left by Sincura explaining that the painting would be returned to the city to be put in a new “street art museum”. 

That was seven years ago, so where’s the museum? 

“It never got built,” Bill tells me. He goes on to explain that a total of five Banksys were removed from the walls of Liverpool, with several of them set to appear in the museum. In the end, all five were sold to an anonymous Middle Eastern buyer for £3.2 million instead. 

Behind the would-be museum were Liverpool property developers North Point Global (NPG) and Sincura. Describing themselves as “the world’s leading expert of [sic] Banksy Artworks”, Sincura were seemingly in charge of acquiring street art from various owners, while NPG were responsible for the museum’s construction as part of the company’s Berry House development — a luxurious 147-unit scheme in the Baltic Triangle that planned to build a mix of studio and one-bed flats. The Banksy museum would be the cherry on top.

Sincura told The Post that their involvement in the project ended there. “We had no involvement in the museum — our only involvement was to remove, restore and return the Banksy artwork which we did,” says a spokesperson. The company were cheeky enough to call their 2014 exhibition of Banksy artworks Stealing Banksy and came under fire from the artist, who made a public statement that “this show has nothing to do with me and I think it's disgusting people are allowed to go displaying art on walls without getting permission.”

At this point in the story you might be wondering what gave Sincura the right to remove the art in the first place. Who actually owns each painting? It’s a tricky one. With most street art unclaimed by artists, ownership is attributed to whoever owns the property it was painted on. Permission to remove works must therefore be granted by the owners of each individual site. Your building, your Banksy.

Yet given the ideas behind street art, that position is contentious. The controversial sale of Banksy's Slave Labour mural in London saw a huge backlash from residents who felt the piece belonged — morally at least — to them rather than the building’s owner. And in 2014, Banksy himself got involved in a row between Bristol City Council and a local boys club that wanted to auction a piece he painted on their building.

Back to Liverpool, where in 2017, NPG’s finances crumbled and the company filed for insolvency, owing in the region of £40 million to creditors. NPG had sold homes at various projects to investors — many in Asia — off-plan, where a large down payment is taken before anything is actually built. Most of the projects remain as dilapidated hoardings or half-built concrete exoskeletons. Needless to say, the street art museum never materialised.

Four of the company’s directors were hit with disqualification orders for financial mismanagement of the Baltic development, temporarily banning them from acting as company directors. One faced a harsher penalty: former director Lee Spencer was given a 24-month suspended sentence in March this year for his dealings at another dissolved company. A Liverpool accountant took control of what was left of NPG. 

Yet one question remained: what about the artworks that were supposed to be displayed in the museum? Despite Sincura’s website listing Love Plane — one of the ‘authentic’ Banksys — as part of a “new Liverpool street art museum”, it was actually sold to the same anonymous art collector in Qatar who purchased the famous White Rat in 2017.

So that’s that. Well it was, until this year.

“I got loads of phone calls one day of people laughing their heads off, so I went on catch-up on TV and there it was,” Bill tells me. There was Bill’s rat mural in pride of place on Channel 4’s The Greatest Auction, having not been seen since it was removed from Liverpool in 2016. “It was quite funny,” Bill says, “but to be fair it was quite annoying the price that it went for — you could have bought two houses for that.”

Viewers watched as a lucrative bidding war for the mural took place, with Banksy dealer Robin Barton emerging victorious with a bid of a quarter of a million pounds. Doubts were raised during the programme as to the artwork’s origins, but the mural’s sales representative, a man subtitled on screen only as Justin, said he believed it to be real. 

I asked Bill what he thought of the auction. He laughs. “Why the fuck would you go on TV knowing… everyone knows that piece was by me. Everyone in the art world, it’s a well known fact.” 

Barton strongly disagrees. “I have been in touch with the artist calling himself ‘Silent Bill’ asking for substantive proof of authorship and have received nothing compelling other than a page in a self-published book showing a picture of the work,” Barton told me. “There are countless self-published books that contain works incorrectly attributed to other artists, and equally there are countless works claiming to be by Banksy that are not.”

If anyone knows a Banksy when they see one, Barton says he does. “I have been successfully trading in Banksy street works for more than a decade and whilst I am always open to being wrong, on this occasion I do think it possible that ‘Silent Bill’ is using Banksy’s own silence to his own advantage,” he told me.

After the programme aired, Channel 4 issued the following statement: “The provenance of the artwork was investigated, as is due process for auctions. The programme-makers made clear to the featured bidders and viewers the challenges of definitively authenticating an artwork of this kind, and heard from expert opinion on the matter.” On Sincura’s own website, the mural remains listed as “not a genuine Banksy”.

So where does all this leave us? It’s hard to say. The collapse of NPG had a ripple effect that went beyond just the street art museum promised to the city. As NPG’s directors came crashing down, so did a handful of projects that were meant to build Liverpool a better and brighter future. Much has been written about the duped investors — some of whom quite literally lost their life savings. But less is known about the Banksys, and the not-quite-Banksys, that also vanished. 

To Bill, this is the thing that matters the most: artwork being stripped from the streets of Liverpool. “It’s not right,” he concludes. “The fact they were taken and promised to a museum — that’s the kick in the balls.”