Unveiling of the Sainsbury’s Concrete Mural in Bexhill, East Sussex, on October 18 2024

Unveiling of the Sainsbury’s Concrete Mural in Bexhill on October 18 2024 after its restoration work by Bexhill Heritage.

Transcript

00:00What I'd like to do is welcome the people who come along today and in particular Kieran

00:12Mullen MP on my right there. Now Kieran actually did some of this restoration and he's also

00:22helped to restore part of the Shelter 4 that we're restoring as well. So Kieran's not

00:30nauseous to rolling his sleeves up and using a paintbrush and a sweeping brush.

00:36So all of you see him afterwards and sign him up for your project because he'll come along and do

00:43some work. Lovely. On my right I'm very very pleased to welcome the Chairman of Rother District

00:52Council Richard Thomas and Sainsbury's, you may not know this, is owned by Rother District Council.

01:02They are the freeholder. Sainsbury's simply leased this building so you know if you've got

01:10any problem with Sainsbury's, Richard's your man. See him later on. This has been one of the

01:16most enjoyable projects that I've worked on for Bexhill Heritage and they're all fun and all

01:22enjoyable, mainly down to a great team that I worked with, most of whom can't be here today

01:29so I wanted to name them and that would be Sarah, Sophie, Natasha and Alex and in particular

01:37Lorraine Parks who can't be here today, she's working, but she was a great project manager

01:42for us and she made it a lot of fun so it was a great project and when we turned up we didn't

01:50really know what to expect. We'd been used to working on the wooden shelters at the seafront

01:54so we're used to rubbing down and painting wooden structures and we'd had some advice from

02:01conservators about how to approach this and initially we started believe it or not with

02:07gentle scrubbing with toothbrushes that very rapidly moved on to quite large scrubbing brushes

02:14and lots of effort but we were disappointed originally because we kept coming back and

02:19it looked dirtier than it did before because we were just bringing all the dirt to the surface

02:24so we moved on to a poultice which was recommended by the conservators

02:30which was like a wet clay that we spread on the concrete and we left it for a few days to dry

02:37and as it dried it pulled all the dirt and the grime and the oil out of the concrete and left

02:42it a lot a lot cleaner and then we were able to paint it as you can see now. A lot of the people

02:50who walked past thought we should paint the whole thing, they thought it should all be covered in

02:53paint but we painted it exactly as it would have been when the artists originally installed it here

03:01so the red and the gold exactly as it is and we were all particularly looking forward to painting

03:06the gold and it was good fun and it's actually a layer of bright yellow paint and then on the top

03:13there's a mixture of varnish and gold mica powder to bring out that beautiful gold effect on the

03:20coins particularly and then the background was quite flaky and soft so we used three coats

03:28actually of lime wash to stabilise that.