doing but I always wanted to make things and I've  got really nice memories of my parents and my  

grandparents helping me to make castles and  drawbridges out of cardboard and I had a great  

childhood of making and drawing and painting and  I knew that that was what I would end up doing.

My name is Luke Edward Hall and I'm  an artist and designer and columnist  

and I am the artist behind this year's English  Heritage handbook cover design. I look to the past  

for inspiration but I'm really trying to bring in  a comtemporary edge. I'm not trying to create a  

pastiche of anything and I'm never really sure  about that word 'nostalgia'. I love looking  

to the past for inspiration and then it's just  about creating work that feeling contemporary.

I was thrilled when English Heritage got in  touch because I'm majorly inspired by the past  

and I love visiting old houses and gardens and  getting inspired and learning about their history  

and so it felt like an amazing fit and also  a chance to do something maybe a bit unusual  

for them so it was really exciting that  English Heritage were really up for me using  

bright colour and they'd always be saying add more  colour in and that was really nice. The idea was  

to work on the handbook design for 2022/2023 so  that involves the front cover and the back cover  

and the little spine, and then also the  membership card and a couple of other things.  

And it's inspired by celebrating Roman Britain so  I was looking up to Hadrian's Wall for inspiration  

and on the cover that's what we see: Hadrian's  Wall, Hadrian himself, interpreted in my own way.

[interviewer] "How would you  describe your work in three words?"

Colourful, irreverent and romantic.

My style I'd say is very colourful, playful,  inspired by the past but hopefully brought up to  

date and made contemporary. I think there's a real  DIY element to it as well, it's very handmade,  

because a lot of my work is  based around my drawings.

I buy a lot of handmade paper. It has this really  lovely texture. I love buying old paper as well  

and actually people give me  old paper. I use a mixture.  

Definitely handmade and old paper  with character is what I love.

I'll use printer paper if I have to.

Window.

Both.

Velvet.

Do I have a favourite board game?

Articulate.

Oh my dog. My whippet.

Probably 1980s English pop music  like Soft Cell and New Order.  

I love music but I can't play anything. I played  the keyboard, I played the piano, I've played the  

guitar really badly when I was younger  and I can't do it and I wish I could.

Too much beige. I love colour. But green I like  because green I think I like most of its shades.

I wear all colours, apart from black.  I don't own any black clothing.

So many good bits. I love... I live in the  Cotswolds and I have to say, I miss the sea,  

yes, but I do love the Cotswolds. The West  Country I love. I love Dorset, Devon, Cornwall.  

All the villages are so beautiful. There are so  many amazing houses to visit, amazing gardens.  

The food is great here. And I love  London. So, too hard to choose.

I think with all projects, because I work across  a broad range of disciplines, all projects usually  

begin with research. So that's going into my  library of books. I have some books here, some at  

home as well. Old magazines. I often do research  online looking through museum collections as well.  

What's really great about a lot of our museums is  that you can view their entire collections online  

so I do that. And often I'll go and visit a museum  or a gallery as well and then I start sketching.  

As you've probably seen in my studio it's filled  with piles of sketches so I start just sketching,  

sketching and I'll see what comes out.  I'll start experimenting with different  

techniques and materials, it sort of builds  from there until I get to the end result.

When we first started talking about the cover  design it was decided that Hadrian was always  

going to feature but it has been through various  stages. The temple was always going to feature as  

well, the pediment and columns. We tried Hadrian  shown as a full figure, we did a shoulders-up  

bust, we did just a head, we tried various things  out. On these preliminary sketches I've drawn  

Hadrian's Wall as a kind of border but we ended  up actually making for the final design a border  

with a kind of rope motif inspired by a fragment  that we saw in the collection at Corbridge.  

With the text at the bottom that says Handbook, I  hand-wrote it, I tried a Roman-inspired typography  

moment. So it's been through various stages  until we finally decided on the final version.

When you go to a museum or whatever and you  see the white classic idea of Roman sculpture  

it's beautiful, but it's a sort of myth isn't it  that they were made like that and actually they  

were painted in these amazing colours, very  vivid bright colours. So I suppose actually  

working on this project it does feel  like it's quite a nice fit actually to  

reinterpret them in my own way that does feel like  it's how they were actually made in the beginning.