Sketches from around Westminster

A lunch break crowd at St. Johns Gardens

Abington Gardens

Dean Bradley Street, view from St. John's

Sketches from around Westminster

Savoy ... fried chicken and curry

Started drawing this decrepit (yet full of original features) corner of Great Eastern Street this afternoon, after intending to draw the TEA building past the crossroads. After much thought, I still managed to get the paper the wrong way round, and spill water over it.

Savoy ... fried chicken and curry

White lion street

With this sketch, I experimented a bit more and has taken it to print room. In order to preserve sketch quality, I used a mix of dry point and monoprint - but didn't post the results here, as it obviously wasn't done on location! Here's the link.

White lion street

Courts of Justice

Courts of Justice in Strand

This is a rather long sketch done with red pencil. Royal courts is a very interesting and challenging piece of architecture to draw from!

Courts of Justice

The Heron and some Cranes

 The Heron and some Cranes. Pencil and watercolour 149 x 210 mm

I went down to the Tate today, to see the Klee's, and after that I popped up to the 3rd floor to paint (as you do.) Then I dropped my rigger brush down one of the grates by the window. I asked the staff to run a recovery operation so I could finish up. If you can't ask an art gallery assistant to get a brush back for you, who can you ask? Needless to say, I didn't use it.

The Heron and some Cranes

Cambridge Heath Road

Cambridge Heath Road Pencil and watercolour 149 x 210 mm

I drew this on soggy afternoon at the start of Nathan Brenville's Bethnal Green Sketchcrawl. Whilst working on this sketch, I kept in mind that intentions matter. I used to make  pencil drawings and then wonder why they appeared to lose something the moment I took a brush to them. Here, I wanted the pencil to be part of the work. This means that the lines here, have a different quality to those in a piece where the intention is a line drawing in its own right.

Cambridge Heath Road

Thamesmead

Thamesmead's Southmere is now being demolished - a place where Kubrick's 'Clockwork Orange', 'Misfits' from Channel 4 and some of Aphex Twin's music videos were filmed, and a nice place to be at! We visited it not so long ago to discover its community spirit, - while there, we have actually felt ourselves in a very unusual London. That's a sketch from the cafe in the middle of it, near the lake.

Thamesmead

South Woodford Odeon, High Road, London E18

Shhh! its just started! Pencil and watercolour 149 x 210 mm Evelyn Rowland

This delightful piece of Odeon architecture is only a facade. Inside it has been divided into the usual 'screens';  perfectly adequate to view but woefully short on experience. 'The pictures' used to be somewhere to go;  the building was important.   Still, the outside is preserved, at least from the first floor up. 

South Woodford Odeon, High Road, London E18

Down to Wapping

I received an email from a young designer who had found my drawings on Flickr and was enquiring about the possibility of using some of them in the redesign of  a menu for a London pub. Now as it happens, this pub is one of my favourite London pubs, so I was immediately hooked. The pub is The Town of Ramsgate, situated down in Wapping. When I was a boy this was a dodgy area that suburban folk like me would rarely visit. Back then it was warehouses, docks and ill-lit streets, with stone setts, and no easy transport links. Now it's very upmarket apartments in converted warehouses and there's a refurbished station for the newly refurbished London Overground.
The Town of Ramsgate dates back to at least the mid-sixteenth century. It is a riverside pub, right next to the Old Wapping Steps, an ancient access to the river itself, and the foreshore. It's an area of interesting history. These steps were the site of execution for those found guilty of piracy, whose bodies were hung on the gibbet until they had been covered by three tides. Captain Kidd is reputed to have been one of these unfortunates. The pub itself was the place where the London mob found and caught the notorious 'Hanging' Judge Jefferies who was trying to arrange a boat to flee his own trial.
If you're visiting London, I'd recommend a visit, just a little walk east of Tower Bridge.
I met the designer at the pub, and had time for a quick drawing from the steps across the river to Rotherhithe:

Rotherhithe from the top of Wapping Old Steps

The visit to Wapping, and my discussions with the designer, made me dig out the old  (2009ish) drawings that I hadn't looked at for a while. Here they are:

Wapping Old Steps, tide rising

Wapping High Street - Gun Wharves

Wapping church

Beside the Town of Ramsgate - alley leading to the Wapping Old Steps

Down to Wapping