BirminghamLive has eyes on the artwork that captivated a city, and he’s lying on his big back in a storage facility up north.
05:34, 03 Apr 2026
King Kong is currently in storage in Sheffield(Image: Marcus Hawley)
Reader, we’ve found Bullring King Kong… and we hear he wants to come home.
The wayward ape, huge and with big human hands, dallies somewhere between terrifying and wonderful, depending on who you’re asking.
The Nicholas Monro-designed sculpture was always polarising and that might well be why we’re still talking about him today, some 54 years after he popped up for a few short months in Bull Ring’s Manzoni Gardens in 1972.
Read more: Birmingham needs King Kong more than ever – in memory of our long-lost Bull Ring love
And why later he was reimagined, making global headlines as he stood sentinel at a pop-up Jewellery Quarter park for the 2022 Commonwealth Games.
That first iteration lives within the garden of the family who owned him after Birmingham chose not to purchase him post-Bull Ring stint.
As we understand it, after visits to Edinburgh, Leeds and Cumbria, the OG King Kong now resides with the people who loved him enough to invest in keeping him. Last we heard, they didn’t want to part with him.
The second version, however, was seemingly lost. But we’ve now located that big boy – and found out how much it’ll cost to bring him home.
Bullring King Kong is in storage(Image: Marcus Hawley)
Where is King Kong now?
When the Commonwealth Games installation was over, King Kong was photographed in temporary storage at a demolition yard, sparking worries about its future.
After that, as far as anyone we’ve spoken to knew, he disappeared entirely.
The reality was, according to Marcus Hawley, former managing director at Cordia Blackswan which commissioned it to be built in the first place, that he was taken in for safekeeping.
Marcus says that when he left Cordia Blackswan, he took the sculpture with him.
Sitting down to chat with us in a cafe, he explains why he didn’t want to leave without King Kong.
He starts by explaining why he commissioned it in the first place
“Nick Monro was a proper child of the 60s, a punk, he never gave in, and never sold out. When the cigarette company gave him the brief, they wanted the sculpture to be city orientated. He made it disorientated. What’s more disorientating than when King Kong arrives in New York?
“People loved him, kids loved him, but the powers that be didn’t. They didn’t buy him, so was brought by a car garage on Stratford Road and then had a chequered history travelling to markets up north.”
After tracking down the original, and learning the family didn’t want to part with it, he contacted Nicholas Monro and asked him to authorise a new version.
It meant a painstaking search for the eccentric artist, his family and a meticulous plan to recreate a version that the artist would be happy with, from the specific colours of his eyes to the precise paintwork and no room for change.
Nicholas, Marcus says, wanted him to be bigger than before. On completion, he went on display on Great Hampton Row.
“We had about 30,000 visitors, a billion impressions around the world online and I was interviewed for national and international media. It was really good.”
Internally though, Marcus said King Kong caused friction between him and colleagues.
“They thought it was a vanity project for me. It got to such a level that I left and instead of taking severance, I said I would take King Kong with me.
“He went into storage in Shropshire and I tried to find a permanent home for him in Birmingham.”
In the meantime, King Kong was taken to a secure arts storage facility in Sheffield where he remains to this day.
According to a condition report BirminghamLive has seen from October 2025 – the pictures from which you’re seeing in this article – he was described as being structurally sound, with some paint delamination and a bit of bird poop on his big old chest.
King Kong was photographed for a report on his condition(Image: Marcus Hawley)
How much would it cost to get King Kong back?
Marcus told BirminghamLive that he is now in a position to sell King Kong and that he hopes someone in Birmingham will consider keeping it here for public display and that if not, art collectors elsewhere in the world could bid for him at auction.
According to Marcus, the auction reserve would be £250,000 and that decisions will be made on his future in the next three months.
The owner added that he expects annual insurance and maintenance costs to come in at around £2,000, with transportation for the giant sculpture somewhere in the region of £4,000.
Paint touch-ups, he estimates, will cost a further £4,000.
Anyone that has interest in buying him can contact Marcus at [email protected].
Does Birmingham want King Kong back?
King Kong is a polarising figure.
Some, like Birmingham’s treasured historian Carl Chinn, feel he ‘never captured the imagination or affections’ of the city, asking: “What’s a gorilla doing in Birmingham? It’s not embedded in Birmingham’s history or people.”
Others, like university librarian James Fisher, describe clapping eyes on him as among the happiest of all their memories. James loved him so much, he wrote the complete history of its existence.
“It does the perfect job of provoking a reaction,” James told BirminghamLive. “There’s absolutely no way with the size of it you wouldn’t have an opinion on it.
“How much street sculpture passes you by and you either don’t take it in at all, or you simply shrug and say ‘it’s ok’?
“That will never be the case with King Kong. Good or bad he will always grab your attention, but in the best way possible.”
The future of King Kong is uncertain. We’ll follow this story as it unfolds as best we can, if you want to stay looped in.
