Girl with Balloon
Banksy mural
Girl with Balloon (also, Balloon Girl or Girl and Balloon) is a series of stencil murals around London by the graffiti artist Banksy, started in 2002. They depict a young girl with her hand extended toward a red heart-shaped balloon carried away by the wind. The locations for this work include street murals in Shoreditch and the South bank in London on the Waterloo Bridge and other murals were around London, though none remain there.
Banksy has several times used variants of this design to support social campaigns: in 2005 about the West Bank barrier, in 2014 about the Syrian refugee crisis, and also about the 2017 UK election. A 2017 Samsung poll ranked Girl with Balloon as the United Kingdom's number one favourite artwork.
In 2018, a framed copy of the work was shredded after being sold at auction by way of a mechanical device Banksy had hidden inside the frame. Banksy confirmed that he was responsible for the shredding and gave the altered piece a new name, Love Is in the Bin. Sotheby's said it was "the first work in history ever created during a live auction."
History
The locations for this work include Waterloo Bridge as well as other sites around London, though none still remain. A 2004 version of the mural was at an east London shop in Shoreditch, sold in 2007 for £37,200 (€54400) at Sotheby's, and was removed by the Sincura Group in 2014 and sold for £500,000 (€690000) on 19 September 2015.
Several sets of limited edition prints of the work were produced, which became valuable over time.
“Girl with Balloon” enters the record as banksy mural. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Girl, Balloon and Banksy can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22000063. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2002, 2005, 2014 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Girl with Balloon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.