ALL PHOTOS CLICK FULL SCREEN.
A few months ago hill walking friend Alan and myself were doing a walk in North Glasgow along the Forth and Clyde Canal then down the River Kelvin Walkway. We passed by Maryhill Barracks, one of the entrance gates seen above and the Wyndford Estate inside. We noticed then several colourful murals some distance away but did not go into the estate itself as it would have taken us out of our way. As I've never explored Wyndford before and as Alan prefers countryside and hills to wandering around city housing estates a few weeks later I came back myself for a solo walk.
To understand this place and why a large stone wall surrounds most of the site today you need to see this link. From the late 1800s to the early 1960s several military regiments were stationed here. Only the outside perimeter wall remains with the land inside it used for social housing, built in the 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryhill_Barracks
It manages to pack a lot of residents into a fairly small area thanks to tower blocks and maisonette/tenement style flats.
Obviously the history of this area was a point of interest but of equal interest to me was the local murals, with ideas and drawings provided by local school children. These murals have been up a while, painted on local safety boards, as several of the high rise blocks are scheduled for demolition with boards placed around them to keep anyone from getting hurt.
I have to say these are some of the best murals I've seen, probably because children were involved... packed with colour and imagination.
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So because they did look temporary... and I'm presuming will be taken down once the work of demolition is finished and ditched or used again somewhere... I thought I'd capture them all here for anyone interested in years to come.
Faces mural.
Flower mural.
Fox mural.
Hare and Fruit selection.
Oceans and Egypt.
Maybe it's precisely because it has a high wall surrounding it that psychologically put me off exploring here... is the only reason I can think of for not going in here before. I've been in far scarier/threatening housing estates with territorial gangs ruling them and wandered through them no problem and visited nearly every housing estate in the central belt over the years either through work or from personal inclination. Walked through Maryhill itself over 100 times now so it's a complete mystery why I've never entered past this wall until now. You would have thought basic human curiosity would have lured me inside. And why do you still need such a fearsome modern deterrent on top of this wall, for a housing estate, when anyone can drive or walk in 40 feet away via several open gates and access roads like the one shown in the first photo. ( probably just there to stop children or adults climbing or walking along the wall then falling off it, rather than for security reasons.)
Rainbow mural. Obviously younger children here.
Reptiles and Comics.
Scotland mural.
Skull mural.
Sunflower mural.
Vase mural.
World map mural. Obviously after future sea level rises have been factored in judging by the UK and Italy's width on this map.
Even though it has a fairly high density of people living within the surrounding wall thanks to high rise flats and lower level deck access types there's still green spaces within this area.
And five minutes walk away you have pathways along the River Kelvin and various city parks within easy walking distance.
Snakes and ladders. A large example in a playground. Not seen one of these boards since the 1960s when I was around eight years of age. Might well date from then when this estate was built.
I thought at first this place was abandoned but it still has a few folk working in it...
As I came from Anniesland and was walking back to there here's one final distance shot of the Wyndford Estate with both the high white flats and the pink ones sitting inside the surrounding high wall. Unique in the city. Probably unique in Scotland for that matter. A worthwhile trip.
I like those too. Work on the demolition doesn’t seem to be progressing much so they could be there some time!
ReplyDeleteHi Anabel,
ReplyDeleteas you know with your own blog many of the things; buildings, murals, paths, routes up hills etc, even photographed five years ago no longer exist so it is a time capsule in a way. I really wish I'd taken more photos of housing estates and significant buildings from the 1960s on-wards, UK wide, as many of the places I visited then have no photos online of their existence at all but photography then was a faff, getting film developed in town. getting them back a week later to find many of them not as good as you'd imagined and everything tiny sized anyway.Three inch square photos of the Alps if you were lucky and so far away you had to tell people it was 14,000 foot snow mountains they were looking at. And it could be expensive if you took a lot. I only really got into photography properly when digital and zoom arrived to do true justice to what I was seeing.
That first batch of murals are really pretty good - are they oldish schoolchildren? Good idea to decorate the hoardings like that.
ReplyDeleteI love snakes and ladders and have a board myself - it's just hard to get others to play it - grownups can be so boring!
Oh my, I LOVE these murals too! Will they really be torn down? Such a shame. The history of that wall is interesting. I wonder how many know it? Sorry, I am thinking like an American, where if you stop average person on the street they will know very little about local history. Probably different in Scotland.
ReplyDeleteThe murals are colourful, attractive, and lots of fun. I really like the way that some of them pop up above the edges giving them a 3D perspective.
ReplyDeleteHi Carol, yes they are really good. The pupils themselves might be really good or their original drawings and ideas might have been enhanced further by professional artists. The Amazonian mural with the frogs and parrot look particularly refined and advanced for school aged pupils though I have seen 14 year olds who were already exceptional artists, though their can't be many per school. I remember a painting a school girl did for a Blue Peter art competition, 14 to 16 cat over 30 years ago that was one of the best and most original paintings I've seen in my life. It was of a nighttime tree lined suburban UK street. Ordinary except for half seen, somehow threatening, nebulous creatures lurking in the street in trees on either side of the orange street light lit road. Basically the inner fears of a lone female walking at night in leafy suburbia expressed in a painting as the creatures were not fully formed, ambiguous as to what they were. Always stuck in my mind as it was truly exceptional. Can't remember what she looked like or who the presenters were at that time. Just remember the art. And I don't even think she came first.
ReplyDeleteHi Kay'
ReplyDeleteno it's the same here. Unless you are interested in history or come from Maryhill a lot of folk in Glasgow would never know it was there unless they've been up that way. I always knew it as Maryhill Barracks as my Dad was in the army during the Second world War. But that was it. I never knew what it looked like with soldiers inside until a few weeks ago researching this post. That's one of the joys of blogging. Going new places then finding out about the history later.
Hi Rosemary,
ReplyDeleteYes, they certainly stood out. Even more iridescent and lifelike in reality standing in front of them. A good temporary addition to the Glasgow mural trail if you don't mind a short bus ride to get there.... and you could walk back via the River Kelvin Walkway and the Plasticine Penguins art in the gorge. (When I say 'you' I mean any visiting tourists that like getting off the beaten track.)