I still remember standing in a grey, water stained underpass in Leamington Spa, trying to picture what metres and metres of dull brickwork could become if the people who actually walked through it every day got a say in the answer.
That question has shaped a lot of my work since, and it's the reason colour, for me, has never just been about what looks good. It's about what a place means to the people who live there.
Every Colour Palette Company public art project starts the same way. Not with me deciding what a town should look like, but with a genuine, open call out to residents, asking what they'd put on the wall themselves. The suggestions come back by the hundred, sometimes odd, sometimes deeply personal, and my job is to take that raw material and turn it into something that actually works as a piece of art, while keeping it unmistakably theirs.
Where it started, and where it’s gone
The methodology behind this began in Birmingham’s Grand Central, and it proved itself well enough that other towns started asking for their own version. Since then, I've been lucky enough to take the same approach into places like Solihull and Leamington Spa, each one shaped entirely by its own community rather than a template applied from elsewhere.
Solihull, told through Touchwood
The Solihull Colour Palette now lives in Touchwood Shopping Centre, on Cloister Walk, a project delivered with Solihull Council and Touchwood and funded through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. Residents, historians and local archivists all had a hand in shaping it, and what came back genuinely surprised me in places.
Greyhound Black nods to the greyhound on Solihull's coat of arms and to local rescue charities looking after the breed. Touchwood Brick honours the shopping centre itself, and yes, there's a fair chance a young Jack Grealish once kicked a ball up against those very walls. Snooty Fox Orange remembers a much loved and slightly notorious town centre venue from the late seventies through the nineties. And Alfred's Custard traces back to Alfred Bird, the man behind Birds Custard, who called Solihull home and left Tudor Grange to the town as a gift.
Twenty six colours in total, each one chosen because someone in Solihull cared enough to suggest it.
Leamington Spa, underground and unmissable
The underpass I mentioned at the start became the Royal Leamington Spa Colour Palette, installed across fourteen panels ahead of the 2022 Commonwealth Games, funded by Warwick District Council and the Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership. Over three hundred suggestions came in during the call out, split across arts and culture, innovation, sport, nature, entertainment, history and community.
Wondrous Blue celebrates Motionhouse, the dance circus company that's called Leamington home since the eighties. Spa Water reaches back to the natural spring that turned a small village into a wealthy Regency town. Joystick Fire nods to the town's genuinely significant video games industry, one of the largest clusters in the UK. And Pride Pink represents Warwickshire Pride, chosen deliberately for what pink has meant to LGBT history and to the trans flag alike.
The panels themselves had to survive a lot more than most art does, vandalism, weather, the daily wear of a working railway station, so every panel uses anti-graffiti vinyl on aluminium, built to last and easy to refresh if it's ever needed.
Rugby, told in three chapters
Rugby's station platform now carries a palette split into three themes, History and Heritage, Creativity and Culture, and Industry and Innovation, developed with the Heart of England Community Rail Partnership and funded by Avanti West Coast. Alongside the public consultation, storytelling collective Ruby Road and artist Jo Chalkblack ran workshops with five local schools and community groups, and together we gathered over two hundred genuine suggestions from the town.
Tripontium Terracotta reaches back to the Roman settlement excavated near Rugby, its colour taken from the fired clay tiles found on site. Gilbert Leather honours William Gilbert, the Rugby bootmaker whose workshop first stitched together the leather ball the sport is named for. Webb Ellis Bronze marks the statue outside Rugby School commemorating the schoolboy credited with picking up that ball and running with it in 1823. And Radio Mast Sky remembers the town's extraordinary role in early transatlantic communication, when Rugby Radio Station made the first two way transatlantic phone call by radio in 1927.
Eighteen colours across the three panels, and every one of them came from someone in Rugby who thought the town deserved to be remembered properly.
Wolverhampton, and a step further
The Wolverhampton Colour Palette pulls together a city built on industry, music, football and community, six colours that locals recognise the moment they see them. Working with Street Stories, we also added an augmented reality layer to the artwork, so the palette becomes something you can point a phone at and see move, giving a static installation a second life for anyone curious enough to look closer.
Bonk's Bitter pays tribute to the beers once brewed on Brewery Road, best said the way a local would. Slade Flame honours the city's own glam rock legends. Old Gold is for the Molineux faithful, the colour that runs through everything Wolves. Cosford Sky reaches up to the aircraft at nearby RAF Cosford. Chimney Blue remembers the much missed Goodyear chimney, a landmark that shaped the skyline for generations. And Trolleybus Green nods to the city's old public transport network, long since retired but still fondly remembered.
It's the same underlying idea running through everything I do, that great design should be fun and genuinely accessible rather than something people walk past without a second glance. The whole project actually started this way. My very first palette, made for Birmingham back in January 2021, was never meant to be anything more than a personal project, and it was the response it got that convinced me there was something worth building properly.
Redditch, voted for by Redditch
Redditch is the project I point to most often when people ask how genuinely democratic this process can be. Working with the Reimagine Redditch programme, Redditch BID and the Kingfisher Shopping Centre, we ran more than thirty workshops and opened an online call out, and hundreds of residents told us what they'd put in their own colour palette. A local panel narrowed those hundreds of ideas down to a shortlist of twelve, and then residents voted properly, around nine hundred people casting more than fifteen hundred votes over a single week, before I sat down to turn the winning six into the finished artwork.
Arrow Blue reaches into Arrow Valley Country Park and its twenty nine acre lake. Kingfisher Teal borrows its name and colour from the bird that gave the shopping centre its own name. Needle Steel remembers a genuinely remarkable fact, that Redditch once produced ninety percent of the entire world's needles. Enfield Chrome honours the decades Royal Enfield spent building motorbikes in the town. Ditch Red is taken directly from the clay that gave Redditch its name in the first place. And Palace Velvet closes the set with a nod to the Palace Theatre, over a century old and still loved for its traditional curtains and seats.
The finished piece now sits three metres square on the wall inside the Kingfisher Shopping Centre, impossible to miss and entirely, genuinely, chosen by the people who walk past it every day.
Colour chosen by the people who Aactually use the space
What ties every one of these projects together is that none of it was decided in a boardroom. It came from real people, genuinely asked what mattered to them, with their suggestions shaping the finished piece rather than sitting in a report nobody reads.
That matters practically as well as artistically. A wall that a community helped choose tends to get looked after. People notice it, talk about it, bring visitors to see it. It stops being decoration and starts being a genuine part of how a place understands itself.
If you’re thinking about public art for your town
I get asked fairly often how a project like this actually comes together, so here's the honest version.
Start with a genuine call out, not a shortlist. The best material comes from asking an open question and seeing what people actually say, rather than presenting a few options and asking people to pick one.
Think hard about where it’s going. A shopping centre wall and a railway underpass need completely different practical solutions, vandal resistance, weatherproofing, maintenance access, and the artwork has to be designed around those realities from the start, not fitted in afterwards.
Let the story do the work. A colour with a genuine reason behind it holds a viewer's attention far longer than one chosen purely because it looks nice. People remember why something is there.
Birmingham, Solihull, Leamington Spa, Rugby, Wolverhampton, Redditch, and a good few places beyond that too, each one shaped entirely by its own community and its own call out. If you’re a council, developer, business improvement district or community group thinking about bringing proper colour into a public space near you, I’d love to talk. Get in touch, and let's see what your town has to say.