Brooklands Estate Mural

William Mitchell (1925 - 2020) was a prolific industrial artist and designer, best known for his large-scale, abstract concrete murals created between the 1950s and the 1970s. During the war Mitchell served as a petty officer on Royal Navy destroyers and later painted murals in NAAFI clubs and Ministry of Defence buildings.

He then studied at the Royal College of Art, focusing on woodworking, metalworking and plastics and received the Prix de Rome. He was appointed Design Consultant to the London County Council in the 1950s and his work began to focus on civic spaces: pedestrian underpasses, roundabouts and squares.

The Brooklands mural was completed in 1958 and is one of the best-kept examples of Mitchell’s early works. It is made of 13 carved chipboard panels, which Mitchell cut to fit on-site and drew the initial design onto them. Mitchell then routed out the design to make an incised line, which he filled with a polyester resin, pigmented to the required colour.

The panels were then polished and fixed to the wall requiring no further maintenance or treatment and providing a decorative surface that was very resistant to wear or damage.

The mural was a London County Council Patronage of the Arts project, commissioned in 1958 for the village hall clubroom of the Brooklands Park Estate. Brooklands is a post-war housing estate laid out in Blackheath between 1955 and 1958. That clubroom is being demolished to provide space for new Royal Borough of Greenwich social housing, but the mural has been saved and will now be restored and relocated to Brooklands Primary School.

Brooklands Primary School, also part the estate, is situated just 250m from the old clubroom, and was built at the same time.

For restoration, the mural will be thoroughly cleaned to remove engrained dirt, paint damage and to stabilise the top layer of the chipboard, which is delaminating and very flaky in parts. Losses will be filled with pigmented resin and areas of loss retouched and coloured with acrylic wash. The mural’s surface will then be consolidated. The Brooklands mural will then be set into a bespoke timber frame and reinstalled in the main hall of Brooklands Primary School.

Read more about this and other William Mitchell mural projects in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/apr/08/london-mural-by-key-postwar-artist-saved-from-demolition