Murals of East Ayrshire

East Ayrshire is now home to an ever growing landscape of stunning murals, many depicting the lives and times of people who lived here in times past. Produced in conjunction with our Community Regeneration teams, many of the murals have been collaborative efforts, with funding from from Place Based Improvement schemes and other public bodies. Organisations such as Newmilns Rengeneration Group, World Burns Federation, and Darvel Development Trust have all worked with their communities, building owners and artists to provide an inspirational and ever growing body of uplifting work, enhancing our public spaces and reflecting the legacy or our exceptional people and the work they have done over the centuries, much of which has had positive effects well beyond this area.

Whether you like the artwork or not, murals facilitate civic engagement, allowing for discussion, about our shared history, and its legacy. We are reminded of what we have to celebrate, and appreciate and they make art on a grand scale, and in a grand way, accessible to all. Murals are cost effective, especially compared to major capital projects and relative to other forms of public art. Murals and public art in general give us another reason to visit the places we love, and encourage those, not as familiar with those places, to visit too.

In summary installing a mural:

• Brings the community together to engage and discuss place
• Has achieved huge positive media attention
• Makes an area more beautiful and colourful
• Anecdotally, has positive impacts on footfall and businesses around the location, and
• Allows a place to express a positive collective identity about itself

In this page we invite you to learn more about the projects, their inspiration and the artists behind them.