16th Century Painted Room

The Painted Room occupies an upstairs chamber at number one Church Street in Ledbury, inside one of the oldest timber-framed houses in a Herefordshire market town unusually rich in them. Tree-ring dating carried out in the early twenty-first century established that the oldest parts of the building go back to 1510. The room takes its name from the scheme of wall paintings that covers it, dated to the 1560s and counted among the best surviving examples of the decorative painting that became fashionable in England during the reign of Elizabeth I. The designs are floral, with biblical quotations distributed among them, and they would once have been an ordinary form of interior decoration for a prosperous provincial household — cheaper than tapestry, and far more common than the tiny number of survivals now suggests.

The paintings survived because they were covered over and forgotten. By the late twentieth century the house badly needed repair, and when major restoration began in 1988 the decoration was found beneath accumulated later layers in the upper room at the lower end of the building. English Heritage was consulted and a firm of art restoration specialists was brought in to clean the surfaces back. The discovery transformed an ordinary listed building into a nationally significant one, and it is a useful reminder of how much Tudor domestic decoration has been lost simply through successive generations painting or papering over it.

The room is now open to the public, free of charge, and is looked after by Ledbury Town Council, whose offices occupy the building. A visit is short but properly guided: no booking is needed, and visitors are welcomed by volunteer guides who give a brief talk about the paintings and the house, answer questions, and then leave people to look at the displays. Because admissions are staggered at roughly ten-minute intervals there can be a short wait at busy times. Opening runs from March to October, with the fullest hours in the summer months, and the same guides also give tours by request of the nearby Market House, the town's celebrated seventeenth-century timber-framed building raised on sixteen pillars.