The story behind the Battlefield ‘Barrowland’ mural in Glasgow’s Southside

The story behind a well-known mural on the side of a Glasgow cafe.

Transcript

00:00It came about mainly by accident really. It was just a blank wall and one of our local

00:07artists had decided just to do a nothing tag on it, just a bit of useless graffiti.

00:14So I thought I'm going to have to paint it at some point and then there was a few murals

00:20popping up on the south side and we thought that might be quite a good wall to do something on.

00:24So we contacted one of the local graffiti artists, Scottish Graffiti Murals,

00:31and he showed them some pictures of the wall and he said that'd be great, what do you fancy doing?

00:37I'm like not really sure, something to do with Southside, something to do with coffee,

00:42something to do with us, you know the kind of usual things. So anyway we went through a whole

00:47load of what it could be and things never really looked that good and we decided maybe we should

00:54just kind of leave it and come back to it. So we were doing the local walk which was the

01:00window wonderland to do in the area. So it's quite a community area, so there was lots of

01:05windows all decorated and we were out with the dog. My wife seen one of the windows was flashing

01:12Barrowland and she said that would work for Battlefield. So quickly emailed him and said

01:18look what do you think? He said excellent, leave it with me. Came back to us, he managed to get the

01:25font and the colours and stuff so it quickly evolved and he put it up on the wall and even

01:34before it was finished, he had started doing outlines of this and you couldn't tell what it

01:40was but it was like this old lady kind of stopped and she looked at it and then she went that's like

01:45the Barrowlands son and so we thought excellent that's what we wanted. So it just kind of captured

01:51that community. You know people use it on their Facebook page, people start to point it as a

01:57destination as well so and rather than just a graffiti mess that you see on shutters and walls

02:04it actually kind of means something to the area. So it's certainly worked for us and it becomes a

02:12destination so right at the very beginning people were, kids were all around getting their picture

02:16taken beside it and it was like people come in from all over the world and they've like their

02:21friends or their family has tagged them into this and they've done a graffiti mural walk

02:26at the south side and came and seen it so that's that's good as well.