Paul Scotcher is the LOCAL PAINTER & DECORATOR whose advert appears below. When we asked him to write a short advertorial to accompany his ad, he solved a local mystery instead . . .

Having an interior decorator’s eye for detail occasionally extends outside of one’s normal territory and into the community. The interesting article on the celebrated artist Aubrey Beardsley in last December’s issue of The Whistler misrepresented an important observation, however. Due to successive decorators’ indifferent clumsy application of paint, the plaque commemorating his birthplace on the wall of 31 Buckingham Road was described as being, “…not that visible or very well looked after…” but the accompanying photograph revealed otherwise.

As a resident of West Hill, I felt ashamed that our conservation area ‘civic department’ could overlook this degree of aesthetic vandalism, so I decided to renovate the plaque myself several months before the article appeared. The irony was, after restoration, the barely legible paint infill lettering revealed delicately engraved wording of Beardsley’s ‘Master of Line’!

Pictured are the ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs I took of the plaque.