Three rat stencils around a doorway in Melbourne were drilled out and dumped in a skip during renovation work.

Meyer Eidelson, the owner of Melbourne Walks, said on his Facebook page: “Australia’s largest remaining group of Banksy street art stencils was recently destroyed.

“A new doorway in ACDC lane destroyed the three iconic works even though their location was well known to the Melbourne arts community.

“The rubble was mindlessly loaded into a skip.”

It is not the first time that artwork by the British artist has been wrecked by construction workers in the city.

Mr Eidelson said two more Banksy stencils nearby were destroyed in 2014.

“I should have seen it coming,” he said.

“Since 1992 we have been fighting to promote the city’s heritage but we are losing. The people have lost control over their own city.

“The fabulous old city that tells the Melbourne story, the city that the visitors come here to see, is shrinking every year.”

A City of Melbourne spokesman said the council had tried to “preserve legal street art murals where possible”, but added that “the very nature of street art is that it is temporary, ephemeral and forever changing”.

“Melbourne is the street art capital of Australia and we see this art as vital to the city’s vibrancy,” she said.

In 2012 an image of a parachuting rat on a shop in Greville Street in Melbourne was destroyed when builders knocked a hole in a wall to install a bathroom pipe.

And the following year, a stencil of another rat and an image of a girl hugging a bomb were painted over on the walls of a church in the city.

There have been other examples of Banksy murals being destroyed elsewhere.

In 2014 a council in Essex painted over a piece of his work because it decided it was racist, and the previous year, a work in central London was removed after the deputy mayor said keeping it would be seen as condoning graffiti.

Banksy’s real identity is still unknown, but he - or she - has become one of the world’s most recognised artists, and pieces of his work have sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds.