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