A painter and decorator for Newlyn, from the fish market to the lanes above it

The harbour side of Newlyn is industrial. Round the fish market and along the quays are net lofts and stores, engineering and chandlery units, the ice works, processing and packing rooms, transport yards, and the offices, mess rooms and welfare rooms attached to them. Walls are hosed down after every shift and the air carries salt from the harbour and wet from the washdowns all year. Ordinary emulsion goes grey and soft in a season.

So the finish is chosen for the washing, not the look. Block and render inside a processing or packing area wants a sealed, wipeable coating that stands up to hosing and detergent, in a pale colour so anyone can see it is clean. Where food is handled the product has to be one made for that use and applied to its data sheet: surface clean and dry, the coats at the right thickness, and the cure time honoured before the room goes back into use. A room coated on Friday and hosed on Monday when the sheet asked for a week will not last, and the smell of a coating still curing has no place near a fish market. We say what the sheet says and plan the job round it.

Steel is the other half of the work. Roller shutters, steel personnel doors, handrails, the stair up to a loft, the frames round a unit: all of it rusts faster here than on a trading estate inland, and paint over rust is a wasted day. It is taken back to sound metal, primed with something that holds on the coast, and rebuilt in coats in dry weather, which on the harbour means the settled months and a forecast we trust. Concrete floors are sealed where a cleanable surface is wanted, cleared and left to cure.

Then there is the timing. Nothing on Newlyn harbour stops for a painter. Boats land through the night and the market sells early, lorries are loading by mid-morning, and the engineers are in and out of the units all day. So we plan round it: the mess room and the office done on a day the crews are at sea, a packing room in the gap between landings, a shutter in the afternoon once the lorries have gone. Areas are cordoned and signed, the working pattern is agreed with whoever runs the unit before we quote, and if the site needs an induction or paperwork first, say so when you ask and we will tell you what we can provide.

Up the hill from the quays the place changes. The old fishing village, the Fradgan and the lanes round it, with Street-an-Nowan running along towards Penzance, is tight granite cottages on steep, narrow streets, and later terraces and twentieth-century housing climb on above them towards Paul and out along the road to Mousehole. Working families and fishing crews still live in a good many of the cottages, second homes and holiday lets have taken others, and the practicalities are the same either way.

Access is on foot. The van stays at the bottom or up on the hill and the kit is carried down a lane too narrow for a barrow, so we allow for that and agree where to park before the day. The rooms are small, the ceilings low and the stairs steep, so one room at a time is the only way to keep the house liveable. The walls are solid granite under old plaster and on the seaward side they carry damp, so the plaster is filled with something that moves, the bathroom gets an anti-mould system, and a stain is traced to its cause before it is painted over. Outside, the render on these cottages needs a finish it can dry through, washed down first to get the salt off, and painted in late spring once the winter has done its worst. A let cottage is done through the keyholder, with photographs back as each room is finished.

Newlyn had a school of painters, artists who settled here in the late nineteenth century for the light over the bay and the working life of the harbour, and the town still has its art gallery on the front. The light is clear, full of reflection off the water, and it shows a colour more honestly than any card. So on a Newlyn wall we put the sample outside, in the open, with the sea behind it, before a tin is bought. A grey that looked soft indoors can go cold, and a plain white can be too much of a thing against that water. We say so on the walk round, because the wall has to look right in the light it lives in, not the light in the shop.