Painter & decorator in Mitcham.

Mitcham gives the lie to the idea that south London is all Victorian. This was a proper Surrey village — the Domesday survey records its church, and parts of St Peter and St Paul's, still standing beside the green, date from around 1100. The green itself survived too, and was designated a conservation area in 1972 after a long local campaign; the houses around it run from weatherboarded cottages to genteel Georgian and Victorian villas, and the ensemble still reads as a village rather than a suburb.

Cricket binds the place together. A match is recorded on the green in 1685, the club that grew out of it claims to be the oldest in the world, and the 1904 pavilion sits on London Road itself, reputedly the only cricket pavilion in the country standing on a public highway. We work on houses a boundary throw from all that, and the brief is usually preservation — lime plaster that wants limewash or mineral paint, timber that wants breathable treatment, and colours drawn from the greens and clay tones the setting already wears.

The other inheritance is lavender. From the middle of the eighteenth century Mitcham's fields supplied the perfume trade so completely that its lavender became known across the world, and when the growers were eventually pushed out they moved on to Carshalton, Banstead, and Chessington. The name survives in the street map — Lavender Avenue above all — and a community dig there in 2025 uncovered what may be a brick distillery from the trade's heyday. Clients here love the connection, and soft lilac, mauve, and green-grey schemes sit surprisingly well in the local light.

South of the village, Mitcham Common spreads across 460 acres of acid grassland and woodland, and the housing ring beyond it — 1930s estates, post-war blocks being done up room by room, family houses hard-used and proud of it — brings the steady family work: hall, stairs, and landing repaints, kitchens hand-painted rather than replaced, and wallpaper in reception rooms where the alcoves deserve it. That mix of ancient and ordinary is exactly what makes Mitcham good ground for decorators.