Banksy is getting into the shuffle in the effort to preserve a grade-II listed former prison complex in England called Reading Gaol.

The BBC is reporting that the famed street artist intends to sell the stencil he used for an Oscar Wilde-inspired mural placed on the building’s exterior wall in March at a charity auction which he hopes will command somewhere on the order of £10 million ($13.3 million) to be used towards creating a new arts center.

The historic structure has been up for grabs since 2019 and is reportedly under consideration to be purchased and remade in a scheme authored by the local Reading Borough Council. 

Now, with his literary idol in mind, Banksy’s pledge would help support the Council’s effort that could keep the former complex from being turned into apartment buildings while also paying homage to the artistic underpinnings from which the Picture of Dorian Gray author drew some of his final inspiration.

“Oscar Wilde is the patron saint of smashing two contrasting ideas together to create magic,” the artist said in a statement to the BBC. “Converting the place that destroyed him into a refuge for art feels so perfect, we have to do it.”

Wilde’s literary production while imprisoned in the 177-year-old structure was rather noteworthy: one of the writer’s most famous poems, The Ballad of Reading, was written as a tribute to an inmate that Wilde saw hanged from his cell a year before he was released in 1897. The prison was actually the last place Wilde lived in his adopted home country before moving to France and eventually succumbing to meningitis at the age of 46 in 1900.

The disused site had previously seen considerably lower-priced bids which were rejected by the controlling Ministry of Justice (MoJ) as recently as this spring. The Council is now hoping the support of one of England’s most famous artists will help eventually lead to a reconsideration. 

“We maintain that the Council’s bid — backed and shaped by the local community in Reading — is a powerful one which delivers heritage-led regeneration of a site of local, regional, and national significance sitting within the town’s historic Abbey Quarter,” Councillor Tony Page said in a May statement. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a catalyst for further investment and a key driver for Reading’s recovery from the pandemic. The Council’s bid remains open, as do the lines of communication with the MoJ. I hope Ministers will now step forward and intervene.”