The head of a central London gallery says he has abandoned his Fitzrovia exhibition space after a £270,000 Banksy print was stolen in a brazen smash-and-grab raid.
The piece, Banksy’s ‘Girl with Balloon’, was taken in September last year by 49-year-old Larry Fraser. Although the artwork was recovered by the Metropolitan Police four days later, Grove Gallery CEO James Ryan says the fallout has forced him to pull his business out of the capital entirely.
Speaking publicly for the first time since Fraser was jailed for 13 months, Ryan told ‘Metro’ the break-in exposed an alarming security gap — and sparked damaging rumours of an inside job.
“If my business is not going to be safe then I don’t have much of a business,” the 36-year-old said. “We want to protect the art and the artists we represent, but the break-in made us look properly at the vulnerability of the traditional gallery model. If you’ve got valuable work from big names, it’s fair game.”
A failed alarm and a wave of paranoia
Fraser used a hammer to smash through the gallery’s glass doors before fleeing with the Banksy. But Ryan only discovered the theft the following Monday morning when his manager called.
“I thought he was winding me up,” Ryan recalled. “I checked the cameras and saw the smashed door — and the painting was gone. I couldn’t understand why the alarm hadn’t gone off.”
The alarm system had tripped earlier, before the critical moment of the break-in, meaning no alert was sent to security or the police. The malfunction left Ryan fearing the gallery could lose its insurance coverage.
“There were a couple of sleepless nights. My initial fear was that it was an inside job,” he said. “You start questioning the people around you. Rumours unsettled everyone.”
Those fears were ultimately put to rest when police charged two men. Fraser admitted burglary, claiming he had stolen the print to repay an old drug debt. A second man, James Love, was found not guilty in September.
‘The High Street’s dead for galleries’
Although the artwork was swiftly recovered just streets away by the Met’s Flying Squad — Fraser was caught on CCTV loading it into a van — the gallery’s confidence never returned.
Ryan says the cost of protecting high-value art in London has become prohibitive, and he knows other galleries that have recently fallen victim to similar raids.
“Other galleries are 100% at risk,” he warned. “Insurance premiums are high and it’s just not cost-effective to showcase well-known artists. The High Street’s dead for galleries. What robbers see is a price tag.”
The Grove Gallery remained open for another year after the burglary, but Ryan says the continuing threat proved too much. The Fitzrovia space has now been handed over to another gallery.
“If people think they can get away with it, they’ll try,” he said. “Some won’t get caught — some won’t even be investigated. Their mindset is: why wouldn’t I?” Photo by Dominic Robinson from Bristol, UK, Wikimedia commons.