St Mary's Guildhall

Heard on the news this morning that the City Council are planning on spending £28,000 on painting the Guildhall Undercroft (restaurant) ceiling white!

I'm surprised they're able to do that, but I suppose it depends what it looked like when it was listed?

That's appalling. Makes you think they don't actually know what they're doing. Leave well alone.

Here's a link to some photo's of the undercroft on Tripadvisor

I suppose you wouldn't want to have old brick dust falling in your soup. Sealing the ceiling! would be a better idea I would have thought.

Have they never heard of lights? Muppets! In any case - how the heck could it cost them £28k?!?

Well it would need a couple of coats at least to cover bare brickwork. I know, been there and done that. Perhaps they will have it rendered, but what an utter shame to cover up such a lovely part of history. Talk about Dumb and Dumber! Here we are with all these cost saving ideas but to no avail I fear.

Ah yes Dreamtime, I'd forgotten about the second coat. OK then, maybe £200 on Dulux and go easy on the party poppers!

If it was coming out of my council tax/hard earned cash, I'd hit the roof.

Looks like Historic England were not too impressed either:-

Mmm . . . What does the next page say?

Looking at the library pictures, there's no evidence they were previously painted. I think that should put the kybosh on their plans. They won't let you fix a building to prevent it falling down without using the original materials. There really are cheap to run high output lights now. I wonder if they could put reflectors in the window bays to bounce light in from outside.

An old print of the entrance to St Mary's Hall.