Your true colours

IN ‘Little England’ (January 12), Ben Robinson praises the ‘candycoloured’ medieval village of Lavenham in Suffolk, but today’s painted wall panels between timber frames are an extreme distortion of how these buildings were presented when they were constructed. The panels were either left unpainted or given a coat of protective lime wash. During the extreme cold weather of about 1600, the walls were plastered over and may have been given light tints over the next three centuries—but not Suffolk pink, as testified in Constable’s paintings. Many of Lavenham’s buildings were stripped of 17th-century plastered surfaces to show the frames again in the early 20th century. Timothy Easton, Suffolk