Reading · Beyond the Walls | Street Art + Travel

👋 Ciao, I’m Giulia Blocal, your street art insider. This is Beyond the Postcards, the travel side of Beyond the Walls, my long-running newsletter on street art, graffiti, off-the-beaten-path travel, and a bit of my life in between.

Each month, Beyond the Postcards takes us to a different city, diving into its street art scene and uncovering all those offbeat, overlooked places you won’t find in guidebooks (unless it’s one of mine 😉).

After Lisbon, Athens, London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Naples, Madrid, Bristol, and Sardinia, this month we’re landing in Glasgow 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿, for the final stop of the first season of Beyond the Postcards.

This is the last issue of the first season of Beyond the Postcards, and therefore your last chance to subscribe at the current price of €5/month or €55/year.

When the second season starts on September 15th with the Berlin mini-guide, I will raise both the monthly and annual subscription prices to €6/month and €66/year.

A subscription gives you access not only to the next mini-guide, but to the full archive, which after this first season has become a growing collection of alternative city guides, street art spots and not-touristy places I love collecting along the way. It also gives you a discount on my street art trips, in case one day you want to explore these cities by my side.

So, if you were thinking about subscribing, these are the last few weeks to do it at the first-season price.

More modern, more industrial and far less tourist-facing than Edinburgh, Glasgow is Scotland’s largest city and one of the stops of the UK book tour for As Seen on the Streets of London. I had never been before, although for years I had heard people talk about it with the kind of affection usually reserved for those cities that are not immediately pretty (my kind of cities 😁)

I also had many artist friends living there, so instead of passing through, I decided to spend around ten days in Glasgow, walking through its neighbourhoods, visiting studios, following walls, drinking pints with artists after a day at Yardworks Graffiti Festival, and slowly trying to understand why so many creative people seem to feel at home in Glasgow.

What I found was a city with a rougher rhythm and a very strong sense of itself, alive in a way that felt raw and entirely its own. Glasgow performs charm differently from other cities: through humour and a stubborn creative energy that seems to come straight from the street.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 In this Glasgow mini-guide you will find: