A huge amount is now happening on site at Dover’s historic Maison Dieu, as part of the Reawakening the Maison Dieu project, with teams of specialists engaged in upgrading, repairing and conserving this impressive Grade I listed building.

One team now on site are wall paintings’ conservators Arte, who’ve begun the intricate job of re-instating the impressive 1883 decorative scheme, of Neo-gothic art-architect and designer William Burges’ in the Mayor’s Parlour.

I met art conservators Tom, Bryony, Catherine, Rosie and Kirsten a couple of weeks ago and was impressed by the painstaking, high-level, detective work they’re doing to identify the full extent of the original Burges decorative scheme beneath layers of modern paint.

Working off two scaffold towers, which provide high-level access to the walls and ceiling, they've been carefully removing modern paint layers in small patches, to reveal the outline of the original Victorian paint scheme beneath - before making tracings, detailed drawings, and intricate stencils of decorative details such as dragons, flowers and birds. This has been supplemented by countless close-up reference photographs.

This will enable them to work out what the original paint scheme was like. A bit like trying to put together a giant 3D jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces as one of the team explained, but really fun when you realise it works and different parts of the scheme you’ve been working on actually fit together!

They are building on valuable work already completed at the Maison Dieu by wall painting conservation specialists Hirst Conservation Ltd and Hare and Humphreys.

When I visited, the empty room next door was being used as a temporary drawing office. The walls covered with recent hand-drawn plans of Burges designs, a metal shelving unit stacked high with rolled tracings of decorative details and a pile of colourful painted animals inhabiting the bottom shelf.

These included a beautifully rendered two-legged dragon. Copied from a design high on the wall of the Mayor’s Parlour, I instantly recognised this fabulous beastie as the wyvern on the Maison Dieu logo.

All the team confessed to being big Burges fans - impressed by his colourful designs and intricate detail. And two, Rosie and Catherine have worked on Burges schemes before. Rosie on the Burges ceiling at Worcester College Chapel, Oxford, and Catherine, doing lab-based paint analysis on samples from Castell Coch, his fairytale castle recreation for the third Marquis of Bute in South Wales. We are in safe hands!

We look forward to seeing their work progress over the next few months, firstly in the Mayor’s Parlour and later in the much bigger Connaught Hall. Watch this space!