From the job

The names behind the wallpaper

Published 26 August 2026 · 4 min read

I am rewiring a house in York that has stood empty for a long time. Three storeys, five bedrooms, every cable in it coming out and a new one going back. The kind of job where you take the place back to its bones before you start putting it right. If you are wondering what that involves, I have set out what a full house rewire in York actually means start to finish.

On the first fix I was stripping a wall and found two circles drawn in pencil on the bare plaster. Someone had drawn a ring, written inside it, and then papered straight over the top.

Two pencil circles on a stripped plaster wall, each containing handwritten names — Two circles, drawn a lifetime apart, one above the other on the same wall.

March 1968

The first one is easy to read once your eyes adjust. It says:

Annette, & Anthony Harrison
& Jean MARCH 1968
HARRISON AND CO.
DECORATORS

Three of them, then. Annette, Anthony and Jean, working as Harrison and Co. They boxed the date in carefully, like it mattered that you knew exactly when. Then they hung the paper over it and went home.

A pencil circle on plaster reading Annette and Anthony Harrison and Jean, March 1968, Harrison and Co Decorators — Harrison and Co, March 1968. The date is boxed, as though it needed underlining.

And a lifetime before that

The second circle sits a little lower down the same wall, and it is much fainter. Even with the photograph brightened right up I cannot get all of it.

What I can read for certain is a name: Harry Leaf. Above it there is another name that I think is Lightfoot but would not swear to. Below it, a date that reads May 19 and then two figures I cannot pin down, most likely 1909. Around the bottom of the circle runs a firm's name, and the only word of it I can make out with any confidence is the last one. Decorators.

A faint pencil circle on plaster, rotated upright, reading Harry Leaf above a partly legible date and firm name — The older circle. Harry Leaf is clear. The rest I am guessing at, and I would rather say so.

So on one patch of wall, in one room, there are two sets of decorators separated by about sixty years. And then me, about sixty years after that again.

Who were they?

I have looked, and I cannot find a trace of either firm. No Harrison and Co decorating in York that I can turn up, nothing for Harry Leaf. Whatever these people built, it does not survive anywhere I can reach. As far as I can tell, the only place their names still exist is on that wall, and until July nobody had seen them for well over fifty years.

That is the bit that got me. Not that it was old. That it was ordinary. Three decorators finished a room in 1968, and before they papered it they wanted somebody to know they had been there. Whoever wrote the other one had exactly the same thought, back when the house was new or nearly.

Trades have always done this

If you work on old houses you find this sort of thing more often than you would think. Names and dates on the back of skirting, inside a cupboard, on the underside of a floorboard. Newspapers stuffed into a void. A cigarette packet left on a joist. Once you have lifted a few floors you start half expecting it.

Nobody is showing off. You are just signing something that is about to disappear. It is a small, cheerful bet that one day somebody will take it apart again, and that when they do they will wonder about you for a minute.

It worked. I have thought about Annette, Anthony and Jean on and off for a month.

The moment everything gets covered up

There is a version of this in my own trade, and it is the reason the find stuck with me.

First fix is when all the electrical work goes in. Cables run, back boxes fixed, everything routed and clipped and dressed. And then the plasterboard goes on and you never see any of it again. What the customer eventually sees is a socket. The actual work is behind the wall, taken on trust, and the only real evidence it was done properly is the certificate and the test results.

Which is exactly what those decorators were doing. Their work was about to be wallpapered over. So they left something behind that said: this was ours, and we did it right. If you want the modern equivalent, it is the paperwork, and I would rather hand somebody that than a signature on a wall.

If you are curious about what actually happens at that stage of a job, I have written up the order of works on a renovation and when the electrician turns up in it.

Am I going to sign it?

I thought about it. It is not really my wall to write on, and the honest answer is that my name will be on the certificate for that house for as long as anyone keeps the paperwork, which is a better record than pencil.

But I did photograph both circles properly before the room went back together, and the pictures have gone to the owner. They are staying with the house, which feels like the right place for them.

If any of this means something to you

Somebody out there is related to these people. Harrison and Co, decorators in York in the 1960s. A Harry Leaf, decorating around 1909.

If either name means anything to you, I would genuinely love to hear it. Drop me a message and I will send you the photographs. It seems a shame that they went to the trouble and nobody ever told them it worked.