The wall belongs to no gallery. It is the gable end of a house on a lane where the tarmac gives out, and for as long as anyone can remember it has been painted — repainted, really, each generation redrawing the same garland of flowers and birds that the last one left.

For decades this kind of work was waved away as decoration, too humble to be called art. The people who made it did not call it art either. They called it keeping the wall nice, or doing it properly, or simply painting — the way their mothers had painted, and their mothers before them.

Now a younger generation is coming back to the lanes to learn it, and in doing so they have started to see the tradition plainly for the first time: a folk idiom of painting, with its own rules of colour and spacing, its own patterns handed down by hand and eye rather than by any book.

The revival is careful, not precious. The new muralists mix modern pigments with the old recipes, and they are unsentimental about which motifs survive. What they insist on is the method — that the pattern be learned from a person, at the wall, brush in hand, the way it has always been learned.

Walk the lane at dusk and you can read the whole history in the layers: a bird half-covered by a later garland, a date scratched into wet plaster a lifetime ago. It is a museum with no doors and no admission, and it is still being painted.