with wall paintings and the imagery is amazing.

There are religious scenes and there are scenes referencing royalty.

There's an amazing survival

of a wheel of the five senses.

The paintings were made around 1330

by a man called Robert Thorpe

and this was a private space in his house

that he used to impress his clients and his friends.

Due to the age of the paintings there are places

where there is complete loss

but overall the survival of this scheme

in this space is an incredible thing.

We're undertaking an amazing project

with the Courtauld Institute of Art

to examine and treat the

fantastic survival of wall paintings

in this amazing space.

Since the paintings were revealed in the 1940s

they have been treated on numerous occasions

If you look across the walls

there are multiple types of different repairs.

Before we can treat a painting like this

we need to understand

from the structure upwards

how the paintings were made.

We need to understand the fabric, how that was constructed,

what materials were used,

how the stones were

bonded together because the

impact of those materials

follow through into the wall painting itself.

And we need to be aware of how those layers interact

with each other in order to conserve them properly.

We have a whole range of new

scientific techniques that we can use,

which allow us to investigate

the paintings without being invasive.

In other words we don't need to take physical samples.

Imaging techniques such as multispectral imaging

allow us to visualise things

that we can't see with the naked eye.

We can use a portable microscope on site

for looking at and characterising

the original materials of the painting.

When we're making our new repairs

we want those materials to be

of similar strength properties.

We look at their grain size,

grain shape, grain distribution,

so we're very careful in our selection process of those materials.

These paintings are painted on to a lime plaster

and on to a lime wash ground,

so we are also using lime based products.

Conservators and restorers in the past

used materials that were

available to them at the time, and they were

working to the best of their ability at the time.

But sometimes some of those materials are inappropriate for the paintings

and they can cause potential harm to them.

In this scheme, we have a wax layer that's been put on it.

That distorts their appearance, the wax

has taken in dirt, it's discoloured itself,

so that's one of the things we want to address in this work phase.

We have to be extra careful

because in taking those materials out

we could potentially destabilise the original materials.

We use specifically reformulated repairs

to help stabilise vulnerable edges of painting

as we are gradually and slowly removing the previous fills.

When we're investigating these paintings

we find out so much about them.

We might find thumbprints from the person

who was putting that plaster in all that time ago.

We find paint splashes

and mistakes in the painting.

It gives you a glimpse of the people

who made these paintings seven hundred years ago

and gradually, before your eyes, they start coming back to life again.

By the end of this exciting project we will

have stabilised the vulnerable areas.

We will have also improved the legibility

of this amazing scheme.

We're asking for public support

to help us preserve these beautiful wall paintings for future generations.