Dickens Bar at the Morritt featuring John Gilroy’s mural

The mural, covering a full wall of the bar, features jolly caricatures from the Dickensian era. Gilroy focussed on the Dickens theme in homage to the authors’ reputed visit to the Morritt, when the mural was finished closer inspection revealed that the colourful subjects were in fact locals who frequented the bar and staff from the hotel.

After some 76 years the mural has recently been showing signs of age and of course the many years where smoking was permitted have damaged the colours. Not wanting to lose such an important feature to the ravages of time we contacted Guinness to see if they would be keen to help us restore and save this work of art and indeed they were.

Following a lengthy search we finally found a wonderful artist specialising in mural’s to take on the painstaking restoration task. Sarah Hodgkins of Charlotte Designs and her colleague Sarah Daniels took just under two weeks to restore the artwork to its former glory, carefully and cautiously bringing the colours back to life and indeed adding a couple of new characters into the scene, see if you can spot them when you visit.