Over several months in spring and summer 2026, Glasgow steadily changed colour ahead of the Commonwealth Games. Walk down Buchanan Street, cross the Clyde at the Squinty Bridge or follow London Road east towards the Glasgow International Arena, and the banners connected the city centre, the river and the main approaches to Games venues. Bay Media installed more than 370 banners across Glasgow for Glasgow City Council, delivering the campaign in two carefully planned phases.
The Brief
Glasgow City Council came to us with a city-wide dressing programme built around the Games — but not only the Games. The council’s plan brought several strands of city messaging together on a single network of street columns: the Commonwealth Games itself, the Glasgow 2026 Festival programme delivered with Glasgow Life, the city’s People Make Glasgow branding, Scotland branding, and a summer-of-sport campaign promoting free and low-cost activities for young people.
The initial survey identified more than 700 potential banner positions across approximately sixty streets, bridges and quaysides. From that, the council developed a final schedule of just under 400 banners at around forty locations, to be delivered in two phases.
What we Delivered
Phase one began in mid-April, more than three months before the Opening Ceremony, with 148 banner positions scheduled across the city centre, bridges and riverfront. Phase two followed from late May, adding 246 planned positions and introducing the full range of artwork. After structural testing and on-site changes, approximately 374 banners were installed.
The campaign was scheduled to remain in place throughout the Games, with removal on 3 August, the day after the Closing Ceremony.
Banners were produced in two sizes — our standard 2,200 × 785 mm format, plus a smaller 1,600 × 600 mm version for the columns along Broomielaw, where the larger size was not suitable.
Coverage extended across three broad parts of the city.
The city centre. A substantial concentration of banners appeared across Buchanan Street, St Enoch Square, Sauchiehall Street, Argyle Street, Trongate and Saltmarket. Many were double sites, with two banners installed on each column.
The Clyde and SEC corridor. Coverage included King George V Bridge, Glasgow Bridge, Victoria Bridge and the Clyde Arc, together with Broomielaw. It continued west along Anderston Quay and Lancefield Quay towards Finnieston Quay, Congress Way and the SEC campus.
Beyond the centre. London Road, Clyde Gateway and Tollcross Road extended the campaign into the east of the city and towards two of the principal Games venues. Byres Road and University Avenue added coverage in the West End, while Pollokshaws Road brought the campaign into the Southside.
Twenty-five Designs
Across the two phases, we printed twenty-five different designs. Eleven featured athlete photography drawn from across the Games programme, including netball, gymnastics, bowls, judo and para swimming. The remaining artwork carried Festival, city and Scotland branding.
The print run for each sport varied considerably. Netball ran to twenty-four banners, gymnastics to sixteen and cycling to fourteen, while weightlifting needed only two. The quantities reflected the planned locations of the artwork and the number of suitable columns available in each area.
The artwork schedule also reflected the location of Games venues. Swimming and para swimming designs appeared along Tollcross Road, while cycling and gymnastics artwork was used on Clyde Gateway and London Road, towards the Glasgow International Arena. Designs representing sports staged at the SEC — including netball, 3×3 basketball, boxing and judo — appeared around Finnieston Quay and the campus.
This helped give different parts of the campaign a connection to the sports taking place nearby.
Selected artwork from the Glasgow 2026 city-wide banner campaign.
Behind the Installation
Before installation, each proposed column was checked to confirm that it was suitable for the banner system. As the final network was refined, a number of proposed positions were changed or ruled out, so layouts were adjusted and alternative columns used where appropriate.
On Sauchiehall Street, for example, the original paired-banner layout was revised to single banners across suitable positions, maintaining an even spread along the street. Elsewhere, proposed locations were removed from the final schedule when the site checks showed that they were not suitable.
Each change was recorded against the mapped schedule. An alternative position was used only where it met the same installation requirements; where no suitable alternative was available, that position was omitted. This allowed the campaign to adapt to conditions on site while remaining carefully controlled and properly documented.
Phase two also had to be threaded through work already in place. Alongside the new installations, there were changeovers on columns carrying phase-one artwork, while individual banners were relocated as the layout around the Glasgow School of Art was refined.
Existing banners displaced by the campaign — including cultural and city-centre campaigns already running across Glasgow — were removed and retained rather than discarded, ready to be reinstated after the Games.
Every installation was photographed, time-stamped and GPS-tagged through ProofRock, our verification system, with reports available to the council the following morning.
Across Glasgow
The result was visible across the city: Glasgow read as a host from the moment visitors arrived. Banners work particularly well for this kind of project because they operate at street level and at scale simultaneously — carrying a message to individual pedestrians while dressing an entire district.
Returning to Glasgow
This was not our first Commonwealth Games campaign in the city. Bay Media supported Glasgow’s city dressing for the 2014 Games, and we returned in 2023 to deliver the city’s banner campaign for the UCI Cycling World Championships. In between, we supported Birmingham 2022. Further afield, our major sporting-event work has included the London 2012 and Paris 2024 Olympics, as well as the Tour de France.
At London 2012, more than 18,500 pairs of our StormSpill brackets were installed across the capital, with zero failures recorded.
Glasgow is only the third city to host the Commonwealth Games twice, and returning twelve years after the 2014 Games gave this project particular significance for our team.
Planning Something Similar?
Whether you are a host city, an organising committee or a brand looking to build a presence around a major event, we can help you plan it properly — from site selection and structural testing through to production, installation, maintenance and removal.