Splash of Colour

Splash of Colour is a community-designed mural created as part of a wider placemaking day in Roehampton. Commissioned by Richmond and Wandsworth Councils in collaboration with Project Centre Ltd, I was invited to lead a team of artists, create the design framework, and facilitate a fully co-created public artwork with residents.

Rather than beginning with a fixed design, we opened with the question: “What makes Alton, Alton?” Over four hours, hundreds of residents contributed paint, shapes, stencilled architecture, and personal stories onto 14 mural boards—transforming a 15+ metre stretch into a vibrant expression of collective identity.

To maintain cohesion without limiting creativity, I developed a curated toolkit of non thematic visual building blocks:  abstract shapes, repeated motifs, and contour lines inspired by the Alton Estate. The result is a bold, joyful mural shaped entirely by the community’s hands and imagination.

Roehampton’s Alton Estate carries layers of history, change, and community memory. This project was designed to make space for those stories—not through consultation, but through immediate, joyful making. With no guaranteed number of participants and a tight timeframe, the challenge was to create a structure that welcomed spontaneity while still producing a cohesive final artwork.

The question “What makes Alton, Alton?” became the anchor for hundreds of micro-contributions across generations. Parents painted alongside children; teens added bold gestures; older residents added motifs tied to long-held memories of the estate. What emerged was a visual snapshot of Roehampton: its architecture, its people, its playfulness, and its evolving identity.

On the Day

During the event, participants were free to combine, layer, remix, and reinterpret these elements. The boards evolved rapidly, filling with expressive marks, repeating patterns, and improvisational combinations. My team and I moved between facilitation and gentle curation — ensuring safety, supporting creativity, and maintaining visual continuity.

At the end of four hours, the boards came together like a puzzle: distinct yet unified, revealing a mural shaped by the collective pulse of the day. Though there were many elements across the 14 boards, the main themes to have emerged from the day were Nature, Architecture, Maps and the Roehampton Rooks!