Four Banksy artworks that should be on everyone's bucket list

The world's most popular contemporary artist has left his mark all over what might be his hometown (no one really knows). Here are four of the best.

Well Hung Lover (more boringly known as "Naked Man Hanging from Window") is the most prominent piece of Bristol street art by Banksy (his tag is a pun on "Robin Banks" - but a graffiti artist's signature can only run to five characters). It was stencilled in 2006 on a windowless wall near College Green and the offices of Bristol City Council.

It shows a nude paramour dangling from a window ledge while a 1950s-style cheated husband scans the horizon, as his anxious wife tries to gently restrain him. The building used to house a club run by Bristol trip-hop collective Massive Attack - one of whose members, Robert Del Naja, has often been nominated (lazily) as Banksy's alter ego. When the council bought the building, it conducted a poll in which 97 per cent of respondents agreed that the stencil should not be removed - and Well Hung Lover became the first piece of legal graffiti in Bristol.

It has since been hit by two paintball attacks, which have left the (probably unintended) impression that the husband's allies are firing artillery at his rival.

The Mild Mild West, a mural painted in 1999 on a wall overlooking what is now a vegetarian restaurant and bar in the "People's [i.e. students'] Republic of Stokes Croft", shows a giant white teddy bear about to toss a Molotov cocktail at an advancing team of threatening riot police. It references battles between police and young people over illegal rave parties in the 1990s and has become a much-loved symbol of, er, muscular-but-cuddly resistance to heavy-handed authority in the western English city.

In 2009, The Mild Mild West was attacked with red paint by an anarchist group calling itself Appropriate Media, which complained that graffiti artists were "the copywriters for the capitalist-created phenomenon of urban art" and "the performing spray-can monkeys for gentrification". So there.

Also in Stokes Croft, in the shadow of a brooding uncompromising council estate (when I last visited, there was a dealer selling drugs in the carpark), the early-Banksy Rose Trap is a delicate still life of a rose caught in a mousetrap. Perhaps it is supposed to be a love trap, but it turned out to be a graffiti trap. Repeatedly tagged over by other "artists", Rose Trap was eventually covered by a Perspex screen which was subsequently pulled off, then replaced, then remounted with a frame protected by graffiti-proof paint.

If you don't want drugs with your Banksy, you can always visit Bristol's excellent M Shed museum, home to Banksy's 2003 energetically sinister portrait, Grim Reaper, which once decorated the hull of the ship and floating nightclub, Thekla.

M Shed is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am-5pm. Admission is free. The other Banksys listed above are on view 24/7, 365 days of the year (366 in leap year).

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