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ABOUT THE PIECE
Two Birds had the best flat white on Palmer Street and a forty-foot brick wall nobody ever looked at. The café was busy inside and invisible from the road. Priya wanted something that would make people slow down on the pavement.
We painted a forty-foot mural down the length of the side wall — two herons rising out of a coffee cup, drawn from birds Priya photographs on the river every morning. The point was never decoration. It was to give the building a face the street would remember, and photograph.
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THE TRICKY PART
The wall itself was the problem. Ninety years of soft brick, three different repointing jobs, and a north face that stays damp until noon.
We stabilised and primed in three stages across four damp mornings, then blocked the drawing out in charcoal at full scale before any colour went down. Mineral paint for the brick, two coats of anti-graffiti seal over the top. The hardest part was scale: a heron that reads beautifully on an A3 sketch turns clumsy at four metres unless you redraw the curve on the wall itself.
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HOW IT LANDED
Nine days later the café had a landmark instead of a side wall. Priya says three people a day stop to photograph it, and most of them come inside afterwards.
We delivered the mural, a sealed finish rated for ten years of coastal weather, and a set of scaled drawings Two Birds now uses on their cups and shopfront. Weekend footfall is up, the wall has its own hashtag, and two neighbouring businesses on the same street have since commissioned work from us.
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