Market dispatch·London
Banksy's Brexit-era Heathrow gate heads to Phillips with £1.8 million top estimate
Banksy's 2019 installation Keep Ou T, built around a Heathrow EU arrivals customs gate, will be offered at Phillips' London evening sale on 15 October 2026 with an estimate of £1.2–1.8 million.

Seven years after Banksy turned border infrastructure into a Brexit-era artwork, Keep Ou T is returning to public view — this time at auction. The large-scale 2019 installation will be offered in Phillips' Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale in London on 15 October 2026 at 5pm BST, carrying an estimate of £1.2 million to £1.8 million. It is on public view at Phillips' 30 Berkeley Square galleries from 8 to 15 October. The work incorporates a salvaged "Arrivals from the EU" customs gate from Heathrow Airport, complete with its original signage and shutter. Across the closed metal barrier Banksy painted the words "KEEP OU"; the missing T appears below in the grasp of one of his trademark rats, positioned beside a padlock at the shutter's base, turning the removed letter into a makeshift tool. The effect is both joke and political statement: the interrupted command undermines the authority of the message, while the rat — a recurring figure of survival, disruption and life at the margins in Banksy's work — begins dismantling it. Keep Ou T was first shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2019, amid the political fallout of Brexit, where the actual airport gate sat conspicuously among more conventional painting, photography and sculpture. It belongs to a short sequence of works in which Banksy addressed Britain's relationship with the European Union: the Dover mural of a worker chipping a star from the EU flag (2017) and Vote to Love, the altered Vote Leave placard shown at the Royal Academy in 2018. With an estimate approaching £2 million, the work is positioned as an anchor of Phillips' Frieze Week sale, which also includes Gerhard Richter's Mathis (est. £6–8 million) and works by David Hockney, Nicolas Party and Cecily Brown. As with any Banksy, authenticity will be established through Pest Control, but the market will be watching whether collectors prize the work's physical scale and political specificity — an unusually literal survivor of a specific historical moment, now assigned a market value during London's busiest art week.


