Whitehouse Rat, 2004

Whitehouse Rat is the largest of his public artworks to have come to market and was nonchalantly painted in broad daylight in Liverpool’s Chinatown, at a time when the artist’s modest public profile afforded him the anonymity that only the hours of darkness would later come to offer him. Little did he realize however, that an image of him painting it would appear in the Daily Mail newspaper 13 years later.

The artwork, which in its original form depicted a giant rat holding a marker pen, spanned nearly 200 square meters of a derelict Grade II listed Georgian building which had previously housed the Whitehouse Pub in Liverpool’s Chinatown, and quickly led to the piece being referred to by the press as The Whitehouse Rat. Its creation was timed to coincide precisely with the September 2004 Liverpool Biennial, which Banksy spectacularly gatecrashed by painting a host of works throughout the city at the same time.

By the beginning of 2008, with Banksy’s global notoriety and reputation soaring, the Whitehouse Rat’s fate began to come into sharp focus, when Liverpool embarked upon its year lo ng installation as 2008 European Capital of Culture. Liverpool City Council had earlier created the Liverpool Culture Company (LCC) to identify the city’s most culturally compromising eyesores and to facilitate their urgent regeneration. As a consequence, the LCC boarded up the lower half of the artwork, which had fallen into terminal disrepair. The response to the boarding up captured the attention of news editors, and it was soon featured on national television, putting the LCC under so much pressure, that they removed their hoardings, and repainted the area surrounding the rat’s head, in a bid to make the building – and the ’troublesome’ artwork – more presentable to their European guests.

By the end of 2008, it was clear that the owners of the building had – quite literally – an asset and a liability in the Whitehouse Rat. On the one hand, its notoriety had potentially drastically inflated the building’s market value, but on the other, as a listed building, the artwork constituted an unauthorized addition to the building’s fascia, which would make its regeneration a great deal more complicated and costly to boot.

The owners of the building listed it for sale and despite a fanfare of media interest it sold for a paltry GBP 114,000. The new owners sold it on once again to Ascot Property Management, who immediately applied for permission to restore the building. The extent of this undertaking soon became apparent to Ascot’s owners, when they established that the lower part of the artwork was completely unsalvageable, and that the top part had been painted onto the stucco plaster facade of the building and would need to be removed by a team of experts.

Watching this debacle slowly unfold were Liverpool City Council, who granted the owners of the building GBP 307,000 towards the property’s restoration and in late 2013, amidst a frenzy of media coverage, the artwork was removed by a specialist team.

Since 2013, there has been much speculation as to the work’s whereabouts, with rumors that it had been re-homed in a newly commissioned Street Art Museum in Liverpool and that it had been acquired by a Qatari collector. In 2018, it fleetingly appeared at London’s ‘Rat Bar’.