Rebuilding Norwich Castle | The Colour Of Power

We want to challenge people's preconceptions. We want people to understand that this isn't just a medieval palace with bare stone walls and brown oak doors. This was a really vibrant place. The interior spaces of buildings like the Keep would once have been really decorative and brightly coloured. I think it's very hard today when we go into something like the Keep and you see the original Norman walls as bare stone. But of course that's as a result of the plaster that was once on those walls falling away. But the new spaces with the new walls enabled us to have a lime wash finish and then put the sort of coloured paintwork that we have very good evidence from other 12th century buildings for. We're here to paint the door frames, some of the friezes around the walls, especially in the chapel, potentially some pillars as well. And we are using the same colours and the same designs as medieval examples that have been provided to us by Tim and Agatha. This is an example of a Romanesque painted arch and this actually still exists in Kempley in Hereford. I'm incredibly lucky and incredibly pleased to work with natural materials and actually mineral and earth pigments. We're pretty much using just paintbrushes and stencils, patterns, tracings, so everything that would be also used by medieval painters, but in a modern setting. These paints being as they are on a lime background, you don't really have a second chance. It's very precise work. A very big element of 12th century interior decoration was painting the fictive masonry. Most people were living in wooden buildings at this time, but it's a really interesting conceit that you make your stone walls with very carefully measured ashlar blocks and then you cover it all over with plaster and you paint blocks of stone on with red lines. It really reflects that sort of status that this is a stone building and we're showing you the actual blocks of stone, even if it's actually painted. The size and shape of the block also follows the original 12th century masonry in the castle. We are keen that the lines are done by hand and using a brush as much as possible. It's a very, very difficult thing to get right. The clay-based paint is just a little tougher than the lime and it's not drying evenly, so it's sitting on top of the lime. If it's a little wetter, it soaks into the lime and becomes bond to it, but with too much water it then runs and you get wobbly lines. If it's a little too thick, you can't get a straight edge, so it's a very fine line between one and the other. Roughly speaking, I think I've pretty well sussed it. The fact that we are the painters, yes, we're not in medieval clothing, but we use the same techniques, the same pigments, in such a setting that will be staying there, hopefully for decades, hundreds of years. It's almost leaving a mark in our history. That's just incredible. My name is Stephen. I'm a specialist in historical woodwork and I'm creating the reproduction pieces for the King's Chamber. There's medieval manuscripts with some beautiful illustrations and a lot of the inspiration comes from those. In that time period, everything was in a very dim light setting, so by using colours and gold leaf and things, it refracted all the light, made it come alive. The paints are all mixed up with pigments and linseed oils from scratch. Unlike today, where everything's a plastic paint that's applied on the surface, a linseed actually feeds into the wood. It's a much more robust finish and people are going to be allowed to interact with the furniture. The finishes have to be resilient enough to stand up to thousands of people. The feeling that you want to create is prestige, status, but also joy in the fact that those colours are out there and that you can use them to create beautiful spaces. One of the real underlying points about the decoration of the Keep is that this is a royal palace. It's not any old building and so that status, the swankiness, is shown off by the fact that you do have fantastic sculptured walls, door surrounds, coloured doors and coloured walls and it really shows that sort of vibrancy that only money and power can bring.