Aldwych is named for the crescent north of the Strand and the theatre that sits on it, and the paper has a comparable date and temperament: a rococo damask from the Cole & Son archive, all leafy scrollwork turning back on itself, drawn at the scale of a room rather than of a panel. The structure is the familiar ogee, but the ornament inside it is loose and asymmetric in the eighteenth-century manner.
It is printed with glitter worked into the highlights, a more restrained device than it sounds. The particles catch only where the scroll turns, so the pattern lifts along its edges and the rest stays matte, giving the damask a raised, almost embroidered quality. Under electric light the highlights come forward; in daylight they largely disappear and the design reads as a conventional print.
That behaviour makes it a paper for rooms used after dark, a dining room, a drawing room, a stair hung with pictures. The 64 cm straight repeat resolves neatly over two drops of the 0.52 m roll, and it takes gilding, dark timber and heavy curtains without strain. Used through a whole room rather than on one wall, it reads as period decoration rather than as an effect.
