IT has seen it all, and sold it all, over 100 years and even as the Barras begins its second century in the solitude of a Covid crisis, the market still resounds with Glasgow life.

French Polisher Maggie McIver (below) rescued the stallholders back in 1921 from the attentions of the police by renting out more than 300 barrows in her yard in Marshall Lane in Calton. And she can still be heard in the archives.

A modest woman with a vivacious appetite for life. Interviewed in her senior years she joked: “I’m 75, as sweet as a nut. I’m as good as 25, a hard nut to crack.”

The Barras’ fame is local and at the same time global. In 2009 it was voted in the top 50 marketplaces in the world. While, in truth, it was on the world map long before that when it became a German target during World War II.

Traitor William Joyce, “Lord Haw Haw”, repeatedly broadcast from his German bolthole of the bombing of the area and its neon sign of a man holding a wheelbarrow. It was eventually removed for fear of bombing.

The Barras became a cultural hotspot in the Swinging Sixties with one soon-to-be-famous Glaswegian finding his inspiration there (and his first banjo).

Billy Connolly remembers well one trader, Frank Bennett. “I think he’s the reason I’m a comedian,” he said. “And he was really funny and he sold trash, those gilt coffee tables with galleons on them and Spanish dancers and so many-piece dinner sets and all that.

“I used to love watching him. My Dad would take me. He’d always throw pens into the audience and shout ‘A green yin for the Fenian, and a blue one for the Bluenoses’ and Thistle fans I suppose got nothing. I always wanted to be like him.”

The Voices from The Barras documentary, available to view on Vimeo, captures the market traders and the punters in its prime.

Margaret Wheeler recalls her partner Malky The Towel Man: “Everyone used to love to get a picture next to Malky.

“Some of the traders used to stand with Dictaphones to try and get his patter so they could go home and copy it but naebody could copy it. He’d start off at £40 and they’d all be there with their hauns up.”

Aritst and former stallholder James (JD) Donnelly recalls another Barras institution: “There was this Irish guy and he used to lie on the ground and you would throw a breeze block and it would burst on his chest.

“And he used to burst chains and the next thing he was staunin’ up and swallowing swords and they must have touched the base of his stomach. We called him the Strong Man.”

Julie and Irene Birkett, of Glickman’s Sweet Shop, which has been around even longer than the Barras (1903), recall their Barras memories. “It was a day out, nowhere else was open on a Sunday.

“Years ago you had the man with the snake, the man selling the cough mixture, the man who opened up his jacket and he had 50,000 watches, there was the man throwing the plates up in the air and [he’d] catch them and then throw them out and ask ‘who can catch them’.

“All that spirit and banter made the market.”

For many the Barras still retains a smell and taste of childhood. Rosemary Winters of the Lieser stallholders family. “There was the chestnut man. I loved the chestnuts and while all the other weans were buying sweets I was always around the chestnuts, I’d be getting a heat too and he would chase me, joking that he was tired of seeing my face.”

The last word goes to antique dealer Maureen Cairns. “I don’t think the city should ever do away with the Barras, the city needs the Barras. Don’t destroy the culture – keep it.”