Heritage Colours

The magazine part of today's Guardian had a large feature on heritage colours, which not only sounds like a great name for a band, but a fine way to make a significant profit from pretentious types with more money than sense.

Apparently heritage colours, period palette as the BBC would say, are a big deal with people who care deeply about interior design - like Guardian readers. Most of us just want something to not clash too much with the furniture, but those who were obsessed with stripped pine in the 80s and stencils in the 90s have now moved on to heritage colours

It seems we have been, for the last 50 years, using newly invented colours which didn't exist before, and shunning the previously popular colours. From a scientific point of view that is nonsense of course, but it is what the paint manufacturers seem to imply.

Heritage colours is a euphemism for 'more expensive paint'.

I don't know what my ancestors in Victorian, Edwardian, or Georgian times did or where they lived, but I suspect they were not landed gentry. Their houses were probably decorated with whatever they could lay their hands on. I don't think a house decorated in the style of my own heritage would be very pleasant.

But then, looking at the different ranges of 'heritage' colours, they don't look very pleasant either. Mostly they are very dull.

Having said that Heritage Colours would be a reggae band with a roots influence. They would be class-aware and take great pleasure in subverting such a pretentious, middle-class concept as a label for their songs about gritty reality. The racial implications would not be lost on them either.