How a City Lost Its Colour, and What It Took to Get It Back

The photographs everyone knew were black and white, so everyone assumed the buildings were grey. They were not. They were, in the phrase of one restorer, 'aggressively pink'.

The evidence in the mortar

The proof was never in the photographs. It was in the mortar joints, where fragments of the original limewash had survived under later render, protected from a century of weather by the very layer that hid them. Scrape carefully and a colour appears that nobody alive had seen on the building.

People do not defend the original. They defend the version they grew up with.

Restoring a colour nobody remembers

Reinstating it was politically harder than it was technically. Residents had grown up with grey and understood it as heritage. The restoration team spent longer in public meetings than on scaffolding, and the compromise — one street repainted as a demonstration, the decision deferred — is arguably the honest outcome.

Ten years on, the demonstration street is the most photographed in the city, and the rest of the district is slowly, voluntarily, following.