Gloucester

On celebrating your heritageI live in Gloucestershire, so Gloucester is my county town and one of the two big towns near me. Whenever I go there these days I try to take a minute to walk around the bak of Northgate Street to look at the concrete mural on the old Sainsbury’s building, which is currently empty pending redevelopment as apartments. I have always liked this mural and I hope plans to remove it before the redevelopment starts and display it somewhere else come to fruition. I think it’s an object lesson in making something memorable out of a blank wall and using the opportunity to commission talented artists.The artists concerned were Henry and Joyce Collins and 40 or 50 years ago they were quite well known for this sort of decorative work. Henry Collins married Joyce Pallot in 1938 and from 1948 on produced a number of public artworks in Britain. They are best known for murals made of concrete, the first of which was for Sainsbury’s in their home town of Colchester in 1969.…