Painter & decorator in Claygate.

Somewhere in a Claygate hedge around 1822 a local man named John Braddick noticed an apple that should not have been there. He sent it to the Royal Horticultural Society, and the Claygate Pearmain entered the fruit catalogues — still grown today, russet-skinned, ripening in October. It is a fitting emblem for a village built on clay pits and market orchards: the brick earth here supplied bricks as far afield as Hampton Court Palace, and when the digging stopped, nurseries and fruit trees filled the ground that the housing later inherited.

The railway created the Claygate we decorate now. The station arrived in 1885 on the New Guildford line, and roughly sixty years of building followed — semis-detached family streets, villas for commuters, and a scattering of mansions in the Ruxley Private Estate and the roads running south. Before that, the settlement was a manor of Thames Ditton, recorded in Domesday as Claigate and farmed from Westminster Abbey's lands; the ecclesiastical parish only emerged in 1841, and Holy Trinity's stone tower rose in 1840 to serve it. Today Claygate is the sole civil parish in the borough, and it behaves like one — a village parade running from the station down into Hare Lane, an Old Village core, flower boxes, and a residents' association with opinions.

That stock keeps our diary varied. The railway semis are classic full-project territory: bay windows, panelled doors, picture rails, and chimneys that reward careful centring when paper goes up. The orchard-era cottages want the gentle stuff — breathable finishes, lime-compatible repairs, colours chosen with the brick. On Telegraph Hill, the ridge that once relayed semaphore messages from the Admiralty towards Portsmouth, the houses catch weather that dictates earlier starts on exterior work. And through it all runs the Rythe, the small stream that gives the village its soft northern edge and keeps ground-floor humidity on our checklist.

Claygate clients tend to know exactly what they like and want it done properly — a kitchen refinished rather than ripped out, a hallway that survives wet dogs and school runs, a papered sitting room that finally matches the picture it hangs beside. We write the specification down, turn up when we say we will, and finish to a standard that still looks right when the Pearmain is ripening again.