In recent years, colouring books have experienced a spike in popularity. Once the realm of young children, self-care and mindfulness trends have given rise to colouring-in as a practice for adults seeking a slower pace of life.
For broadcaster Emma Barnett and husband Jeremy Weil, then, their indie publisher Colour Your Streets seems to have come at just the right time. Rather than depicting fantastical scenes or cosy tableaux with woodland creatures, their location-oriented colouring books celebrate the familiar and the everyday, with each one boasting 16 illustrations of local landmarks for readers to make their own.
By their suggestion, we meet at a café around the corner from Brixton Village in South London, which features in Colour in Brixton alongside other iconic local beauty spots, from the O2 Academy and the Ritzy cinema to the tube station. The idea for hyperlocalised colouring books originated just a 10-minute walk down the road, in 2023. “I was on maternity leave with our newborn daughter and we were walking around Brockwell Park with our son, who was five at the time,” explains Barnett, who hosts BBC’s Today programme. “We were talking to him about local landmarks and things in the area and we thought we could draw them… We just thought there must be something we can buy of the local area that perhaps would have some of the history, but there wasn’t.”
After failing to find a colouring book of their area, Weil had a stab at creating one himself. “Jeremy put something together on the screen – a page – and then a page became a book. Our son loved it and thought it was very exciting, and then his friends saw it. And then we thought, well, maybe there’s one of the next area, and there wasn’t. And that’s kind of how it began. It was a sort of home project and then we thought there was a gap in the market and Jeremy kept designing and playing around with it. I suppose I’m quite a harsh critic and it got to a place where I was happy with it.”
Weil, who is the company’s CEO, concurs: “I thought, if [Emma was] happy with it, then others will be too.” The duo took their inaugural book, Colour in Herne Hill, to a local gift shop, which was keen to stock it. A slew of books for other neighbourhoods in South London soon followed. Two years and more than 180 books later – including collaborations with the likes of Buckingham Palace, Fortnum & Mason and Soho House – Colour Your Streets is still working its way through a hefty backlist of requests.
“We’ve been inundated since the beginning,” Weil says. “I think when we started, we thought the opportunity was really for areas within London. And then, soon after we released the first few books, the emails just started to flood in: ‘Can we have Manchester? Can we have Portsmouth?’ That’s when we realised that there’s a much bigger opportunity actually to map the UK – that’s our ambition.”
How do they decide which area to focus on next? “We sort of triangulate the demand,” he explains. “We can see what people are searching for – and I think that’s quite unique about us, because we have a website, we sell directly to a customer, as well as through traditional trade and wholesale. So we can see all these people are searching for Suffolk or, you know, Bury St Edmunds or wherever it might be.
When we started, we thought the opportunity was for areas within London, then, soon after we released the first few books, we realised that there’s a much bigger opportunity to map the UK
We triangulate that with what people say on social media and we also look at population density a little bit to get a sense of which areas are most likely to do well.”
Once they fix on their next subject, they call on local knowledge to help decide which landmarks to include. “Often there’s a community group, or it could be an organisation, like a business improvement district or a visiting information centre or a charity. In an ideal world, we work with a local community group of some sort who will say: ‘Yes, these are the landmarks that we think represent this area best.’” Next, working with a range of freelancers, they obtain images and transpose them into illustrations, before pulling them into a digital flatplan, which is then sent off to the printer. Their products are now stored in a warehouse in Nottingham but, when they started out, this used to be an entirely home-based operation. “We’ve moved on from our daughter’s bedroom,” Barnett jokes.
One of the first real signs that they were “on to something” was when Jeremy Vine, Barnett’s colleague at the BBC, unknowingly bought the Chiswick book for his daughter, who was going off to university. “He wanted her to have a piece of home,” Barnett explains. “He then blew up the cover of the book and put it on his Channel 5 show and essentially did a free advert for us. I messaged him afterwards and said: ‘I love that you love this – this is our publishing project!’”
Although Colour Your Streets started out as a labour of love for their son, two years on it has also established a steadfast adult client base. “It’s another way of telling stories between ages,” Barnett says. “If you’re going to sit and go back through somewhere you’ve just been with your kid, it’s amazing to have a prompt, and often children draw themselves in and then adults tell a story – it’s a very nice cross-generational souvenir.”“That works both up and down,” Weil agrees. “We’ve had people buying for parents who might have dementia or have moved away from their homes, as well as buying for their children and grandchildren.” Barnett adds: “The history of colouring is really interesting because it started with maps. It wasn’t for children, necessarily; it was for young-ish adults learning. I think we’re bringing some of that back.”
Looking to the future, Colour Your Streets is working on building a “bigger international footprint”, Weil explains. “We do have some books of other places outside of the UK, but we are hoping to launch more dramatically, if you like, in other English-speaking markets in the near future, as well as publishing other artists… their artwork should be slightly different to ours, but still very much along the theme of place and colouring-in.”
The two are also planning more brand collaborations; last month, they attended Top Drawer, a craft, design and gift trade show in Olympia, which gave them the opportunity to chat to other brands about how they might work together on a colouring book. Barnett describes this area as a “fast-growing and exciting” part of the company: “Our first bespoke book to go on sale was Fortnum & Mason, which had never had a colouring book in its entire 318-year history. I happened to be at an event there and I thought how incredible it would be to colour in F&M… it’s such a beautiful book. It really speaks to the history of that building, the façade.”
Weil adds: “I think what we’d say with the brands is that, yes, it’s a colouring book, but it is a way also to tell their stories and their heritage and what they’re about. Sometimes it’s about the building, but it’s also about where they’ve come from and what’s inside the building as well as what the brands represents. It’s an opportunity for them to tell the story they want to tell in quite an engaging way, in quite a unique way.”
Despite Weil’s aptitude for colouring-book construction, he has no prior experience in graphic design or publishing. His background is in B2B and data journalism, most recently for the Economist, which he left in 2024 to pursue Colour Your Streets as a full-time venture. Barnett, on the other hand, continues to dedicate her mornings to the Today programme, and tackles communications and editorial tasks for their company in her afternoons. She is also the author of two non-fiction books, Maternity Service (Penguin) and Period (HQ), so she says that it has been fascinating to learn about “the other end of the process”.
She jokes that, as parents, they have the coolest jobs. “Often children can’t understand what their parents do. And it would be very boring to hear that your daddy or your mummy were CEOs or co-founders or whatever. But if it’s to do with colouring and pens, they understand.”
I ask whether their son is more interested in her colouring gig than her radio one, and she allows that “second to colouring, broadcasting might be the next most cool job… But no, it’s very, very lovely building something that our children love. It really is. And it’s been a brilliant industry; we’ve found it extremely friendly”
“We’ve had lots of people very happy to share their knowledge and advice with us,” Weil agrees. “And it’s just a lovely thing to do. You create colouring books of places that people care about. It’s very joyful.”