Unveiling of the Sainsbury’s Concrete Mural in Bexhill on October 18 2024 after its restoration work by Bexhill Heritage.
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00:00What I'd like to do is welcome the people who come along today and in particular Kieran
00:12Mullen MP on my right there. Now Kieran actually did some of this restoration and he's also
00:22helped to restore part of the Shelter 4 that we're restoring as well. So Kieran's not
00:30nauseous to rolling his sleeves up and using a paintbrush and a sweeping brush.
00:36So all of you see him afterwards and sign him up for your project because he'll come along and do
00:43some work. Lovely. On my right I'm very very pleased to welcome the Chairman of Rother District
00:52Council Richard Thomas and Sainsbury's, you may not know this, is owned by Rother District Council.
01:02They are the freeholder. Sainsbury's simply leased this building so you know if you've got
01:10any problem with Sainsbury's, Richard's your man. See him later on. This has been one of the
01:16most enjoyable projects that I've worked on for Bexhill Heritage and they're all fun and all
01:22enjoyable, mainly down to a great team that I worked with, most of whom can't be here today
01:29so I wanted to name them and that would be Sarah, Sophie, Natasha and Alex and in particular
01:37Lorraine Parks who can't be here today, she's working, but she was a great project manager
01:42for us and she made it a lot of fun so it was a great project and when we turned up we didn't
01:50really know what to expect. We'd been used to working on the wooden shelters at the seafront
01:54so we're used to rubbing down and painting wooden structures and we'd had some advice from
02:01conservators about how to approach this and initially we started believe it or not with
02:07gentle scrubbing with toothbrushes that very rapidly moved on to quite large scrubbing brushes
02:14and lots of effort but we were disappointed originally because we kept coming back and
02:19it looked dirtier than it did before because we were just bringing all the dirt to the surface
02:24so we moved on to a poultice which was recommended by the conservators
02:30which was like a wet clay that we spread on the concrete and we left it for a few days to dry
02:37and as it dried it pulled all the dirt and the grime and the oil out of the concrete and left
02:42it a lot a lot cleaner and then we were able to paint it as you can see now. A lot of the people
02:50who walked past thought we should paint the whole thing, they thought it should all be covered in
02:53paint but we painted it exactly as it would have been when the artists originally installed it here
03:01so the red and the gold exactly as it is and we were all particularly looking forward to painting
03:06the gold and it was good fun and it's actually a layer of bright yellow paint and then on the top
03:13there's a mixture of varnish and gold mica powder to bring out that beautiful gold effect on the
03:20coins particularly and then the background was quite flaky and soft so we used three coats
03:28actually of lime wash to stabilise that.