Green, blue, red, purple, pink,… We all love those cute little residential streets in Brighton where every terraced house shines in a different colour than the two neighbouring ones, turning the street into one big colourful rainbow.
What makes it look even cooler is when the colour of the cars parked in front of them actually matches the house front! That was what Lisa thought when she spotted this colour-coordinated parking in Kemp Town’s Blaker Street for the first time.
“It first sprang to my mind when I saw an ambulance that was parked in front of two houses in my street, one of them green, the other one yellow which perfectly matched the colours of the ambulance. I thought it looked really cool and took a photo of it”, Lisa remembers that moment back in September last year.
Having taken the picture, she totally forgot about it until she came across another case of color-coordinated parking sometime after. “I don’t think people actually plan it but once I started looking for it, I just saw more and more. I took pictures whenever I discovered a match and put them on my Instagram”, she tells us.
Keen on getting more pictures for what has turned out to be a little collection of colourful shots, Lisa is constantly looking for accidental colour-matching between parked cars and houses in her street. The young woman is especially eager to spot a match with one of the purple, orange or pink houses, although she hasn’t got much hope for it to happen.
“There are very little pink or purple cars so I really don’t expect it to ever happen. Every time I see a pink or purple-coloured car in Brighton, I just want to stop the drivers and ask them to park their car in my street just so that I can take a picture”, she jokes.
A special place in her collection is dedicated to a dark green van she has found no less than three times parked in front of a matching house and with a stunning progression each time. First time she saw it, it was only the van, then it was the van and another vehicle matching colours.
When Lisa spotted the van a third time, she couldn’t believe her eyes as there were three cars parked right next to each other in front of houses of the same colour! “Omne trium perfectum, or all the good things come in threes. I know you’ve seen these colours before, but this was too good not to share” was how she expressed her excitement about the photo on her Instagram account.
Although she likes them a lot in her pictures, Lisa refuses to have a car. Whenever she needs to get around the city, she does so on her old racing bike which happens to have the same colour as her house.
Of course, the passionate photographer for her Instagram account didn’t miss out on the occasion to immortalize it in a picture.”It’s also a little statement. Everyone should be riding bicycles, also in hilly Brighton”, she says with a little laughter.
But for her, the colour-coordination doesn’t stop with cars and bikes. Originally from the Netherlands, she decided to do a postal vote for the election earlier this year. When she received a bright orange envelope to send her form in, she couldn’t help but take a picture of it in front of an orange house in her street.
“I sort of wanted to encourage people in the Netherlands to go and vote by showing them ‘I live in the UK and I vote. You live back home in the Netherlands, so you can vote as well”, Lisa says. The orange envelope might have gone to the Netherlands with her vote in it, but her hunt for colour-coordinated parking in Brighton continues!
Here are some more photos of Lisa’s colour-coordinated parking collection.
Not the most colourful of her shots, but she still expressed her excitement in her Instagram post: “This doesn’t seem like a special parking colour coordination, but just think for a moment: there are only a handful of normal, brick houses on the most colourful street of Brighton, and how many brown cars do you see driving around?”
Red to red and blue to blue. Most of her pictures feature cars with “ordinary” colours.
Sometimes, finding two cars parked in front of colour-matching houses makes her doubt her “it happens by accident”-theory.
Blaker Street in Kemp Town is said to be the most colourful street in Brighton. The perfect spot to look out for colour-coordianted parking.
