I watched a sweet half-hour show last week called The People’s Painting: A mural for Glasgow. It followed artists Louise Chappell and Becky Bolton – AKA Good Wives and Warriors – on their quest to create a mural in Parkhead in the East end, to celebrate the Commonwealth games. The city has a long tradition of murals, including this beauty. For theirs, the artists wanted to involve the people for whom it will be an everyday sight, so they walked around asking locals what the area and more broadly Glasgow means to them. They went into the chippie Val D’Oro, which is run by a tenor who likes to sing to his customers and asked him. They also asked a guy who runs  a “not for sale” shop full of extraordinary junk he mostly can’t bring himself to part with (he was wearing loads of watches on each arm for sale/not for sale).

Anyway, the result is a vast detailed illustration with references to everything from the former steel works to rope from the local twine (former rope) factory and pigeons.

About the pigeons. I had no idea that there is also a big tradition of pigeon keeping in Parkhead. However, if you look up to the tops of buildings in the area you can apparently  see many pigeon homes – or doocots – and more dramatically, there are 4m high doocots dotted around bits of public ground as well as in some people’s back gardens. They look like urban beach huts, Dungeness-style. Kinda.

Photography by Joe Shaldon

Photography by Joe Shaldon

Another one in Firhill, the west end of the city and very near to where I’m from.

Photography by Joe Shaldon

The doocots tend to be black or dark green and are not generally marked out to identify their owners, but most locals will know who he is. And he, whoever he is, has to stop by regularly to feed his doos and clean out the roof crate. It’s a sport that requires dedication. It’s also apparently quite competitive according to a gent on The People’s Painting, who became interested when he was around eight years old watching the men in his neighbourhood obsessing over their doos. Disputes and thefts are commonplace and there’s been incidents of arson – wowee. So entrances to the doocots are high up and approached by ladders – for humans, the birds come and go via a slim opening just below the roof.

It strikes me as quite a rural pastime going on deep in the city and it doesn’t surprise me at all to find so many photos of them on the website Architecture Glasgow.

Can’t wait to have a good look for them when I’m next back.