Our Story

The World Vintage Colours Story

World Vintage Colours began not as a print business, but as a publishing project. Our earliest work focused on football history books, for which we commissioned specialist colourists to create cover imagery and illustrative material.

Over time, a simple question emerged: why not do this work ourselves?

What began as curiosity soon developed into a discipline. Through years of self-directed study, experimentation, historical research, and technical refinement, colourisation became a core part of what we do. As the project matured, our work expanded beyond colourisation alone into design, layout, and the creation of complete finished pieces, allowing us to control not only the accuracy of the images, but how they are presented and understood.

Every image on this website is the result of that process and is produced as a museum-grade fine art print on 400gsm archival stock, available directly from our shop.

World Vintage Colours has since gained national recognition. Our Scottish football club colourisations were selected by BBC Scotland for use as the studio backdrop on Sportscene during their 2020–21 Scottish Cup coverage. Our work has also been featured in the respected football magazine When Saturday Comes (November 2020), while Northern Insightbusiness magazine published a three-page article exploring the project in depth.

Our colourisation work focuses exclusively on the pre-war era up to 1945, though in practice the majority of our material dates from the 1870s through to the early 1930s. As a result, everything on this site represents football history approximately 90 to 145 years old.

All original black-and-white source material comes from our own extensive archive of historic postcards and photographs, built up over more than 45 years of collecting and trading, supplemented by carefully selected private collections. Nothing is sourced casually or reproduced without detailed consideration of provenance, accuracy, and historical context.

As our reputation has grown, so too has the scope of our work. In addition to developing World Vintage Colours as an independent project, we are regularly commissioned by clubs, museums, historians, and private collectors to undertake bespoke colourisation and design work. Increasingly, we are approached to adapt our methods and visual style for external projects as World Vintage Colours continues to scale.

We have worked with the Charlton Athletic Football Museum and a number of respected football historians to produce colourisations of historic players and teams for research, exhibition, and publication. We have also been granted access to the archives of Charterhouse School, one of England’s most prestigious institutions, where we colourised their 1881 FA Cup-winning side — an image later featured in When Saturday Comes.

Association football was codified in Britain before spreading across the world to become the most popular sport on the planet. Preserving its earliest visual record is not a trend or a novelty — it is a responsibility. At World Vintage Colours, we see our work as part of that duty: to safeguard, restore, and accurately present the foundations of the game for future generations.