The National Wall Paintings Survey is a vast and internationally important archive, comprising records of all known British medieval wall paintings as well as extensive material on post-medieval schemes of painted decoration.
Set up by Professor David Park in the early 1980s, the Survey documents the nation’s most lavish courtly and ecclesiastical murals alongside paintings in more humble contexts. Encompassing photographic records, conservation reports and previously unpublished art-historical research, as well as some 2,500 original paint samples, the archive constitutes an exceptional record of the condition of our wall paintings and forms an essential point of reference, both for art-historical scholarship and for those charged with the ongoing care of these works. Of particular interest is material bequeathed from the records of such pioneering wall painting conservators as E. W. Tristram and Eve Baker, the exquisitely illustrated research notes of renowned antiquarian Edward Croft-Murray, as well as Muriel Carrick’s comprehensive documentation of domestic decorative schemes.
Generously funded by grants from the Paul Mellon Centre, Pilgrim Trust and Marc Fitch Fund, this database is the product of a three-year initiative to make the Survey archive available online. Our ambition is to share those resources which are most valuable to our users across the academic and heritage sectors, and to attract new contributions which will ensure that the Survey remains a dynamic and up-to-date record of the nation’s mural heritage. This initial project has seen the archive fully catalogued and, with the assistance of an extraordinary community of volunteers, partially digitised – a task we hope to be able to continue.
While the archive itself is structured hierarchically, according to material type (ecclesiastical and secular), and organised by county and site location, this database makes it possible to search also by a painting’s date and subject matter. For enquiries related to the Survey, or to contribute new material to the archive, please contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Search the Survey by different criteria
The digitisation of the National Wall Paintings Survey was made possible by the generous support of: