In York, a seemingly normal apartment was hiding a historic secret for centuries until a kitchen remodeling exposed it to the light of day.
29-year-old Luke Budworth received a call from the men putting a new kitchen into his apartment. It read “did you know there was a painting behind here?”
It wasn’t a painting, nor a bit of leftover Victorian wallpaper as Budworth had originally suspected, but rather a frieze dating back hundreds of years ago depicting a Biblical scene
The kitchen remodeling was finished before Budworth could see for himself, but after doing a little investigation in the open-plan living space he discovered another frieze. He contacted Historic England, the largest historical preservation society in the country, to see if they were able to make sense of the discovery.
Over time, Budworth came to learn that York had once been encircled by a wall, and his second-floor apartment was built using some of this wall. The ground floor is taken up by a cafe and charity bookshop which is listed as being a Grade II Georgian building from 1747.
Yet his discovery dates even further back. Historic England gave him and his partner a full-size replica of the frieze to hang on the wall, and Budworth used the Biblical imagery as a reference and managed to find a picture exceedingly similar from a book called Emblems written in 1635 written by the poet Francis Quarles.
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Historic England explained that pictures such as those in the frieze fell out of fashion by the year 1700, so the work was done between those two dates, potentially placing it nearly 400 years old.
“They raise various questions about the ages of the buildings in this row of historic homes and the history of Micklegate itself,” Historic England told CNN. “Finds like this tell us that our historic homes have many secrets and we’ve been pleased to work with this homeowner on looking after these murals for the future.”
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