A Banksy mural painted in Hull in 2018, whitewashed by vandals within days and rescued by a quick-thinking window cleaner, has been tracked down by the BBC to a storage facility in Norfolk, more than 120 miles from the East Yorkshire city where it was made. Its future remains unknown.

The mural appeared on the disused Scott Street Bridge in Hull, showing a boy in a helmet raising a wooden sword with a pencil attached to its tip, crying "draw the raised bridge!" The joke worked on several levels: the bridge had been closed to traffic since 1994, frozen in a raised position because of its poor condition, and the pencil on the sword played on the idea of the pen being mightier than the sword. Some read the work as a comment on Brexit; Hull had voted 68 per cent to leave the European Union in 2016. Days after it appeared, the mural was painted over in white, but a window cleaner rushed to save it before the paint dried.

Hull City Council later said it would pay about £60,000 to move the 22-foot-wide mural to the city's Trinity Market and build a display case for it, but has not answered repeated BBC questions about whether the contract was ever awarded. Local councillor Rosie Nicola told the BBC that nobody would say where the painting was or when it would go on display, calling the situation wrong. The council's secrecy deepened at a committee meeting in 2025, when an official asked where the artwork was replied simply that it was a secret.

An engineering firm, Alan Wood and Partners, won a £900,000 contract to dismantle the bridge and preserve the artwork. The episode has become a minor emblem of the fate of Banksy's public art: a work made for a specific place, attacked almost immediately, salvaged by an ordinary passer-by, and then kept out of sight for years while its home city argued over what to do with it.