Painter & decorator in Walton-on-Thames.

Painters were drawn to Walton-on-Thames long before us. Canaletto set up by the river in 1754 to record the first Walton Bridge, that improbable timber lattice Samuel Dicker built to replace the ferry; Turner came for its brick successor in 1805. Six bridges have now stood on the site, and the current crossing — a single-span parabolic arch opened in July 2013, with nothing in the water to hold it — keeps the town on the map for anyone who cares about engineering as well as scenery. We take the hint. Two and a half centuries of artists thought this reach of the Thames worth looking at, so the finishes on its buildings are worth getting right.

The town's own fabric goes back further than any of the bridges. The Old Village clusters around St Mary's, Grade I listed, carrying Saxon material in its walls, a twelfth-century core, and a ring of eight bells whose oldest dates from 1606; Jerome K. Jerome even worked the church's scold's bridle into Three Men in a Boat. Cottages in those lanes are repair-first jobs — soft brick, old lime, timber that has been painted many times and never kindly. South of the station the eras stack up in order: Victorian and Edwardian villas, interwar semis, and then the redeveloped centre, where The Heart of Walton replaced the 1960s precinct with shops and several hundred apartments that keep us busy with communal programmes and landlord turnovers.

Culture and memory sit comfortably together here. Riverhouse Barn — an eighteenth-century threshing barn rescued from dereliction and opened as a community arts centre in 1989 — runs theatre, exhibitions, and music a short walk from the bridge, and the streets around it hold some of our most finish-literate clients. New Zealand Avenue still carries the memory of the First World War hospital at Mount Felix that gave it its name; Ashley Park gave the world its first documented game of baseball in 1749, with a Prince of Wales batting.

Commuter logistics shape the calendar — semi-fast trains reach Waterloo in around twenty-five minutes, so weekday households are empty but the roads are not, and everything moves in the shoulder hours. That is our default rhythm in Walton-on-Thames anyway: written specification, protected floors, a swept site each evening, and a final walkthrough that treats the client's eye as the last quality gate.