Dean paints shopfronts in Kings Heath, NN5, a short run out of Northampton town centre to the north-west, 1.7 miles in a straight line. In practice that means the units on Park Square, a small 1950s parade with flats above, where finishes need to cope with graffiti and work must keep residents' doors open.
A medal-winning parade being brought back
Park Square sits on the central axis of the Kings Heath plan, south of the green, flanked by flats. Its shopping centre won a RIBA bronze medal in 1953, three years after J L Womersley designed the estate. Later decades were less kind: the Buildings of England described it as boarded up and bleak, and the estate was named in 2022 as one of 225 left-behind areas in a study commissioned by a group of MPs.
That is changing. Since 2022 the Kings Heath Partnership has put money into community projects, and Park Square became the focus in March 2026, when around 50 volunteers using materials from Travis Perkins gave its walls new cream paint and black edging. A shop owner or landlord painting a unit now is doing so next to fresh walls, so a tired fascia or flaking frame shows up more than it did.
Working with the cream and black
The units are shops at street level, including a Londis and the Our Favourites takeaway, with pillars around the square. A frontage that ignores the new scheme can look out of place; one that picks up the black edging on its frames or the cream on its pilasters will sit well with the rest of the parade. That is a suggestion rather than a rule, since there is no conservation area here and no listing on the parade. Your own brand colours can still go on the fascia board and door. Our main shopfront painting service page explains how a full frontage is prepared and what it covers.
Finishes that cope with graffiti
Graffiti has been enough of a problem at Park Square that the council’s Graffiti Taskforce is funding further work there. For a shopfront, that changes the choice of paint:
- Hard, smooth finishes on doors, frames and stallrisers, so tags can be removed with cleaner instead of solvent that strips the colour underneath.
- A clear anti-graffiti coating over painted masonry and stallrisers where tagging recurs, applied once the paint below has cured.
- A colour you can buy again and a note of the exact product, so a tagged panel can be painted over without the patch showing.
A well-recorded finish is cheaper to look after than a perfect one that cannot be matched. Ask us to leave the details with you when the job is done.
Keeping the flats above usable
The flats over the Park Square shops sit behind a glass barrier, and their entrances share the frontage with the businesses below. While a shopfront is being painted, residents still need to come and go. We keep doorways clear of ladders and sheets, put up wet paint signs at any door that has just been coated, and paint residents’ entrances at the quietest point of the working day, agreed with them beforehand.
The shops themselves usually stay open, so the messiest preparation is timed for the quieter part of the trading day, and the entrance is always kept usable. Graffiti removal, scraping and priming can be done one bay at a time. If the inside of the unit also needs attention, perhaps between one tenant and the next, our commercial painting service covers shop interiors and can be booked alongside the frontage, so the unit is closed for as short a time as possible. Workshops on the industrial estate are covered from our Kings Heath area page too.
Last updated by Dean, DH Painter & Decorator.
