supergrass in san francisco

April 10, 2026Leave a comment

I’d been back from Europe for less than a week and I was off again, this time down to San Francisco to see a performance by the band Supergrass. I had been planning this for ages, and would be staying overnight in the city. I got into Supergrass back in 1995 when I was still just about a teenager, but in all those years I never got to see them play live. They were doing a special tour playing their first album I Should Coco, the mark its 30 year anniversary. Now is the real resurgence of the old 90s Britpop bands, coming back out and playing again; we saw Pulp for the first time in 2024, then they brought out a new album in ’25, but the big news comeback was the massive reunion tour of Oasis (another band I was well into but missed seeing live). I knew there was no chance I’d get to go to that tour, since it sold it out so quickly, and tickets were astronomically overpriced. Supergrass though was such an exciting prospect for me, I loved that youthful optimistic first album, but I was massively into their second album In It For The Money. My friend James in England (fellow Supergrass fan when we were at uni) saw them at the Roundhouse (and was standing next to James McCartney at the show) and had told me how good it was, that they also played a bunch of other classics as well as running through the album. So I was well looking forward to it. Then the night before leaving, I was talking to my wife and she said that, well you know Oasis are playing in Los Angeles this weekend, there are apparently still some tickets. Yeah, but I’m going to San Francisco to see Supergrass, I can’t do both. Why not, she says. We looked, there were still some good seats at the Rose Bowl on Sunday evening. Sure, but where would I stay at this short notice? Flights would cost so much, too days out. As it turned out, I had a Southwest credit from a cancelled trip to Vegas earlier that year (I had planned to fly down meet my friend in Vegas, who was participating in a big poker tournament, but he had to cancel due to illness). My wife was able to find a room at a nice hotel in Pasadena on points, and so I booked the ticker… this was going to be the big 90s Britpop weekend, Supergrass and Oasis, 19 year old me would be freaking out with excitement, and it only took me thirty years and a lot of mileage to finally see them. Sure I was still exhausted after the long summer trip but as they say, here we go.

I took the Amtrak down, sketching the view from the window. I planned to hang about in the city during the day before checking into my (cheap) hotel, and going to the show. I’d be getting up next morning to fly from SFO down to LAX, but as always I try to fit in as much extra sketching as I can, because there’s NEVER ENOUGH SKETCHING is there. I jumped onto the Muni, and headed out to the Inner Sunset area around Irving Street. I like it up there. I drew some of the colourful shops (and then didn’t even colour two of them in). Sketching in the bigger portrait format like this I tend to do larger drawings, and they tend to take a bit longer, and I tend to get bored drawing them. But I enjoyed standing out on this street watching everyone go by and drawing these buildings, I know I have sketched this row before (see how it looked in 2010 when that ‘Easy Breezy’ cafe was a placed called ‘Tutti Frutti’). This place must have a contract that when it becomes something new, it should still have a rhyming name.

I had some lunch in Crepevine on Irving Street, and sketched a couple of people chatting in my little brown book. I just liked the pinks and greens.

Later in the afternoon I went over to the Little Shamrock pub, opposite Golden Gate Park. I have sketched here before; they still have one of my drawings on the wall, which I did back in 2013. It is one of the oldest pubs in the city, established in 1893. I sat on one of the little benches outside and sketched in pencil, but regretted the pencil I was using and wish I’d drawn in pen. It’s this two-page portrait format, it seems like a good idea, then I get bored and impatient with it, the bigger size. Still it’s good to sit and observe. I was being observed by the people at the bar, who would occasionally come out to have a look.

When I was done, I came in for a pint. It’s cash only, I rarely carry cash any more. I do like the interior, there is a lot to draw and usually a good atmosphere, on a Saturday afternoon. I’ve never been in the evening. I sat and sketched this interesting little corner, and then turned and drew the bar area. I used my fountain pen this time. I think I was a little conscious of time, and unwilling to really dive into too many details. I still had to get back to Union Square and check into my hotel, eat something, then head to the Supergrass show.

So I did that. My hotel was the King George, and it was a bit crummy to be honest, the room was pretty grim. I was going to stay in the nice new hotel next to the Warfield, but figured I was not going to be there long enough to need anything nice. In hindsight I wish I had; the couple of blocks or so between the King George and the Warfield were, well very sketchy to say the least, classic Tenderloin. It did not feel very safe walking down there during daylight, and I’d have to come back this way after dark as well. A lot of very dodgy people hanging about, it’s not a great place to be by yourself. I got to the Warfield early; it’s a fantastic venue. I last went there in 2015 when we saw Noel Gallagher, and the acoustics were very impressive, like being inside a gramophone. A lot of famous bands have played here over the years. My seats were good. There were some Italians seated next to me; I was wearing my AS Roma shirt. The opening band were pretty good, I did do a quick pencil sketch of them singing about the A1 road in England (or maybe it was a song about European paper sizes, I don’t know). Then Supergrass came on, and I was 19 again. Well no, if I was 19 I’d have been pogo-ing about down in the crowd and not wearing glasses. They were really good, for being older (they weren’t very old when they first started so we’re about the same age; singer Gaz Coombes is a month younger than me, the drummer Danny Goffey shares my birthday but is two years older, the bassist Mick Quinn – not the former Coventry and Liverpool striker – was born in 1969 so he is ancient). We all look good for our ages I think. Supergrass had a lot of fans in San Francisco, mostly of a similar age to me. They played the whole of the I Should Coco album, including my favourite track from that, Sofa of My Lethargy, which I used to listen to over and over in my old bedroom in Burnt Oak. They stopped and started on a couple of tracks, maybe a bit out of practice, or maybe some of the album tracks are just well difficult to play live, they were really creative with their switching of time signatures and interesting chord sequences. This was live music though, man, and it felt pretty real, hearing these songs I only knew from my old CDs being played in real time. Watching the drummer put in a proper shift. It was great stuff. They played a few other classics, including Richard III, which I rocked out to in 1997, Late In The Day, and Sun Hits The Sky, which definitely had a different element to it as a live track. There were no fancy theatrics, just really good live music. They finished with Pumping On Your Stereo, which was never my favourite of their singles but had a fun video, and was a feelgood way to round off the show. Well enjoyed it.

I didn’t enjoy the walk back to the hotel. Market Street after dark was not somewhere to hang about, and there were plenty of spaced-out unpredictable people outside the venue. I took a slight detour away from Mason Street, which was dark and foreboding but was the quickest route to my hotel, and grabbed a chicken burger in Carl’s Jr a block away, though that was a fairly scary experience itself, like I was stuck in a scene from Blade Runner. When I finally got my greasy tasteless food, I left the grotty fast food place and headed towards the hotel. There’s an Irish pub on the way that I remember going to once (with my Mum, when we stayed down here years ago; she actually loved the Tenderloin), Johnny Foley’s, so I popped in to have a post-show beer and sketch. There was a band playing old 60’s numbers, they were really good. I sat at the bar and sketched it, while tourists from China came in and drank pints of Guinness next to me. It was then time to to go to bed, because I had a long day ahead of me on Sunday – Oasis in Pasadena.

back again, late summer

April 3, 2026Leave a comment

When I’m so far behind with posting it feels like I’m telling stories about a time I don’t remember any more. End of summer 2025 seems like such a long time ago, the world just keeps getting further into horrible history. Up is down and right is wrong and who knows where it ends. Still, I go into my sketchbook to try to understand if not the universe or the world, then just the place that is right in front of me. I was pretty tired after that long trip, and eager to get back to routine. September is still very hot in Davis, so I sat in the shade on a bench outside the Varsity Theatre and drew that. I hadn’t come back from my big sketching trip with some sort of new insight into sketching, so this is just the usual say-what-you-see, I have to draw something type of of sketch. Work is still quiet in early September, it’s the tail end of Summer, and Davis isn’t that busy again yet. I did see an interesting car on D Street painted in DHL logos, so I started to draw that, but ended up taking a photo and doing the rest later, as the owner came and drove off. It looked like a large toy car. It reminded me of the story told by Eddie Jordan, the late great Eddie Jordan (he died just last year), former Formula 1 team boss, whose team Jordan Grand Prix used to race in a distinctive yellow livery. In 2002 DHL started sponsoring them, and in those days DHL’s colours were white and red, but Jordan raced in yellow, due to a contract with a previous sponsor, and they didn’t want to change their colours. So DHL instead changed their branding colours to match Jordan, and the famed yellow and red DHL branding you see today is apparently a result of that.

leaving london again

April 2, 20261 Comment

Here are the last few from my trip to Europe last summer, starting with the sketch drawn on the flight home. It’s like if I don’t sketch on the flight now I can’t tell if I flew or not. It does relax me on the flight though, helps pass the time rather than watch some silly movie, which I do anyway. This particular flight took off late, which is always fun as I love airports so much. This was the last page of that Moleskine sketchbook I really didn’t like much; you can see a few paint swatches from the Aquarius Watercolours that I got at the Symposium, plus a few others I was trying out there. I was definitely ready to go home by this point though, real life was calling, and as much as I love London it was starting to get on my nerves. I had a 5k race to run the next morning in Davis too (the Labor Day Run; I did pretty well too), and it was super nice to be back in Davis, back to routine, back to my own bed. There were a couple of sketches from my last Saturday morning in London though, as I decided to jump on the tube and head down to Oxford Circus for some very last minute shopping. I went to Liberty’s, they had their Christmas stuff up already (it was August!), and then found the Oasis ‘Live 25’ pop-up shop and bought some merch, and a nice black Adidas long sleeve shirt. I then sketched the church with the very pointy steeple just past the top of Regent Street, All Soul’s Langham Place. I remember years ago, when I was an open-top-bus tour-guide, we’d go past this and I’d say it was the sharpest pointiest church in London. It was designed by John Nash, who built Regent Street and also a lot of the buildings around here that date from the Regency period. You could say he suffered from Regency Bias. (Damn, I wish I had said that on my tour).

Then I walked down Mortimer Street, and started a sketch of the buildings below, which caught my eye. I started drawing the windows, and outlines, but then decided it would have to be finished later as I needed to get the tube back to Burnt Oak, as I was going up to Watford with my mum. So I walked down towards Goodge Street; as I was about to cross Charlotte street, one of those guys on a delivery e-bike zipped in front of me, Deliveroo, having jumped the red light. I said instinctively “he just went through a red light,” and went on with crossing the road. But the bike man stopped, and yelled back at me, “yeah does it bother you?” I was a bit shocked but he kept yelling that at me. I responded yes it bothers me, you went through a light as I was crossing the road. Anyway I kept walking down Goodge Street. Next thing I know, he is right behind me, on the pavement on his bike, saying “I’m following you on the pavement now too does that bother you?” He was pretty aggressive, and started to threaten me and ride in front of me. After telling him to leave me alone he kept on, to the point where I realized he wants an argument here and probably more, so I just decided to ignore him completely, and walked around the back of his bike and across the street. I could hear him still when I turned into Goodge Street. I was a bit shaken about it, but not much, maybe I should have reported it to the delivery company but what’s the point in that. There had been so many times going around central London where those bloody e-bike delivery guys have cut in front of me as I’m crossing the road, it’s dangerous, and there are some not very nice people with tendencies towards aggressive behaviour out there. I got on the tube and back up to Burnt Oak.

After a month away, I was ready to get back home, and I was so done with London for now. I love London and won’t have people knocking it, but it can be exhausting and I’m often glad I don’t live and work there any more. When a man is tired of London, he is tired of those e-bike delivery drivers, add that to the list, but you get them everywhere now. While it was sad to leave my London family, it was nice to get back home to my California family, and do that 5k run while still jetlagged (easy peasy). Anyway a week later I would be off again to San Francisco to see Supergrass play, and then, though I did not know this at the time, flying off to Los Angeles to see Oasis. I’ll save all that for another post…

Some Time in Soho

March 27, 2026March 27, 2026Leave a comment

Back in London from Berlin, I rested for a day before heading down into central London on Friday for some more sketching before heading back to California. I had a standing ‘groundling’ ticket to see Twelfth Night at the Globe Theatre, but since it looked like rain and I was not up for a trek to the South Bank, I decided to go down to Soho and sketch around there before meeting up with my friend Roshan. If I’m going to stand for a few hours I may as well be sketching. I like exploring Soho. I made my way to St.Anne’s Churchyard on Wardour Street. I always liked the steeple of St. Anne’s. Many years ago when my mate Rob lived in Soho at the end of the 90s we could see the steeple from his living room window. It reminded me of a Teletubby. They have those big round ear things, if you remember, I didn’t really watch Teletubbies. I stood in the Churchyard and sketched the colourful bunting, love a bit of bunting, especially love the word ‘bunting’, it’s so ‘England’. Takes time to draw though. While sketching, two women (Romanian I think, I recognized some words) came in and sat in the churchyard dragging oversized suitcases with them. One of them was very noisy, yelling at the other in a loud raspy voice. It was a bit distracting, but you don’t really expect silence in Soho. I stood next to a tree, and soon an old man came up and started throwing bird seed on the ground, right in front of me. I didn’t think I thought I was a bird, but right away several dozen pigeons came out of the trees and surrounded me. This would make a good magic trick in a story, I thought, the old man throws birdseed, you are surrounded by pigeons and then VOOM you are gone, transported to a pigeon dimension. Actually that would be quite a bad story, the sort of one that would have been made in the 1970s and replayed right up to the 90s in the 5:10pm slot on BBC1 kids TV. I’d still watch it. At least no pigeons pooed on me. I was going to say ‘SHOO’ but remembered that this is an anagram of ‘SOHO’ and I thought, better not, magical anagrams and all that. It didn’t rain, a few droplets, so I drew the steeple as well. It doesn’t really look like a Teletubby, now I think about it. I looked up their website; St. Anne’s was built by William Talman, who was ‘clerk or works’ to Sir Christopher Wren, and consecrated in 1686. Then the Blitz came and destroyed it in 1940. It was rebuilt in 1990. I didn’t go inside, but being outside under the bunting was enough, like being in a village churchyard.

I remember coming down there as a teenager in the early 90s wandering about exploring London, when I would occasionally sketch but mostly just explore the city, make a map of it all in my head. This corner of Soho was a bit like stepping into a different, dangerous world, a Dickensian London but set in the 70s, all sex shops and seedy cinemas and prostitutes openly hanging about on a Saturday lunchtime. The corner below, leading into that little alley of Walkers Court just off Brewer Street, was one of the seediest spots, I remember being shocked at all the neon lights and dark doorways leading to god-knows-what, it was a world that I wasn’t part of and definitely didn’t want to be. Rupert Street facing it had market stalls and newsagents alongside shops selling bondage gear and ladies of negotiable affection calling out to passers-by, and passing down the narrow Tisbury Court back up to the relative normality of Old Compton felt like a brief passage through a frightening dimension. I found it fascinating that this was a real place in the middle of the city, and yet also just another neighbourhood where people lived their normal lives. I remember at school, we were tasked with doing a project about ‘community’, and I struggled for ideas, but I remember walking through this area (I think it was with my uncle who was going to a cool movie poster store down the street) and realizing there was a community living in Soho, even here in this bizarre world of neon lights flashing ‘girls! girls! girls!’ and shifty men in doorways. Soho is a blend of communities but it is and always has been a residential area, a village in the middle of the city. London has a lot of those. A few years later when I was at university and my mate Rob lived on the corner of Rupert Street and Winnett Street with his girlfriend, it was still an area of sex shops but already seemed less scary, and we would pass through Walkers Court on the way to the supermarket to buy milk and tea, not paying any mind to the red light district we were passing by. I remember that we stayed up and watched the whole Star Wars trilogy (back when there was only one trilogy), while from his kitchen window you could catch a glimpse into other windows, where there were other fantasies going on, some in full view (did these windows not have curtains?). These days, this part of Soho feels quite different. There are a few sex shops and the big green Soho’s Book Store on the corner of Walkers Court feels less like a seedy emporium and more like a cheeky part of Soho’s adult-themed heritage, but this mostly this area feels like it has gone upmarket now with fashion stores and such. Raymond Revuebar, the big theatre and strip club that I felt was the centre point of Soho, opened by Paul Raymond in 1958 but finally closed in 2004, having stood lighting up this corner for decades. I vaguely recall going to a gig there in about 99 or 2000, or maybe that was at Madame JoJo’s next door. When my friend lived around there he actually met Paul Raymond, and said he really was the King of Soho. There’s a fashionable clothes shop there now. I stood on the corner of Rupert Street to sketch this, thinking about all of this past, and how everything moves on.

Below, the spread of Wardour Street, just a few steps away from the last sketch. I feel like I spent a lot of the 90s down this street too, a busy but relatively narrow thoroughfare splitting Soho in two. I stood in a precarious location to draw this, a traffic island that has been converted as a parking spot for those electric bikes you see all over the place, with a narrow bike lane to my right. As I took a quick picture of the scene before starting to sketch, a policeman came up and said, “ello ello ello, what’s going on ‘ere then, you gotta be careful sah, there is ‘orrible tea-leaves on bikes who will nick your dog-and-bone, sunshine”. Actually he didn’t say it like that, my head was still in old 1970s films. He just said to eb careful taking pictures with my phone as there are people on bikes who will snatch it from my hands very quickly. I knew this is a particular plague of London these days and have been quite careful with this, though especially here you can’t be too careful, and I actually smiled and felt genuinely grateful that there are police out there watching for this and warning people. Though what I said was, “oh it’s ok, this is my old phone”. which it was – I used my old phone when out and about in London, just in case – but I was grateful and thanked him. Still, I held tight onto my sketchbook as I drew the scene, out of the way of the e-bike bandits. Wardour Street was always one of my favourite streets, and it contains The Ship, one of my favourite pubs in London. It used to contain The Intrepid Fox as well, the best rock pub in the city, where I sometimes would meet up with my friends from the Hellfire Club (on Oxford Street) and attempt to listen to figure out what each other was saying over the loud heavy metal music. It was sad when that place closed (it actually moved to New Oxford Street before closing for good). For a little while in ’96 I went out with someone from Italy, and she used to work in an arcade further down Wardour Street near Leicester Square, before she switched jobs to work in Las Vegas, not the city but the arcade on the left of this sketch, which still has the same sign as it had 30 years ago, a Soho relic. Cinema House is next door; this area is at the heart of the British film industry too, or at least it was (Cinema House has a fashionable clothes store now, because there aren’t too many of those). What was the Intrepid Fox next door is now a steak house, but you can still see the old stone sign of The Intrepid Fox on the outside corner. The sky was looking nice, above Oxford Street in the far distance. You can just about make out the Telecom Tower poking through on the right (follow the arrow). For some reason I remember being about 19 or 20, walking down here on a late afternoon having been to the Virgin Megastore, where I’d bought myself the Beatles Complete (Guitar/Vocal Edition), a massive book with all the Beatles songs in it (which I still have), and treating myself to a pastry and some tea at a nice cafe as a self-reward for finishing up all of my college projects and homework, and that being quite a nice moment down here. It often feels a little too busy or a little too cramped to stop and sketch on the corners around here, but I’m glad I spent the time looking at it again. Soho is always worth sketching. I’ve been back to London since this trip last summer, and I was in Soho sketching again just last month. By this rate I post my sketches on this blog, those will probably be up by about 2028. Click on the image to see it bigger.

auf wiedersehen, Berlin

March 26, 2026March 26, 2026Leave a comment

I’ll finish up with the remainder of my Berlin sketches and thoughts. I definitely had a lot of thoughts when visiting the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall Memorial) in the northern section of the city, close to the Nordbahnhof. before heading up there I walked over to the Hackescher Höfe, which I had visited a couple of days before with Omar. I wanted to visit the art and bookshop there, at the Haus Schwarzenberg, which is covered in graffiti and has a stairwell full of art and posters and stickers (and signs saying not to take photos; I broke that rule). The shop I visited was called ‘Neurotitan’ and was an incredible place, I bought some zines and stickers there, and asked the assistant if they had Detlef Surrey’s book ‘The Wall Revisited’ (I’m pleased to say I held a conversation in German and was totally fine; normally I need a couple of beers before the German comes flooding back). I had heard that this store stocked it, but she said that the last copy had just been sold that day, probably by someone else who had seen his talk in Poznan. I showed her my sketches of that talk, she said that I could probably get in touch with the publisher to get a copy (I did, once I got back to the US, but it took some time and a bit of extra money – thanks a lot, bloody tariffs – to get one sent over to America). I had that book on my mind now especially because I was going up to the Berlin Wall Memorial, which Detlef had talked about at length. I took the S-Bahn out to Nordbahnhof (I realize that sentence implies that I simply got on the S-Bahn, and just went to Nordbahnhof, but leaves out that I got on the wrong train in the wrong direction at least twice, like when you try to fix a scratch but end up smashing up the table, but I did end up at Nordbahnhof in probably more time than it would have taken to walk). The Berlin Wall Memorial is a preserved section of the Wall and the Death Strip, along Bernauer Strasse. It was already early evening when I arrived at Nordbahnhof (sketched below), which during the Cold War was closed down, a ‘Ghost Station’ on the divided S-Bahn system, where West Berlin trains would not stop but passengers would catch a glimpse of a time capsule manned with armed guards. I found the Berlin Wall Memorial chilling. This was not like the East Side Gallery, here was the Wall as it looked, along with rows of metal poles installed like bars you can walk through. One section remains closed off to give an idea of what the Death Strip really looked like. Berlin is a city that dares you not to forget its past. On a metal display in the middle of the grass are the names and faces of every person who was killed trying to escape from the East into West Berlin, 136 in all. The faces as they look out at you, some so young – even children – was frightening. There were blocks occasionally showing where people were shot trying to escape. The Wall was up from 13 August 1961 until 9 November 1989. I didn’t get to see all the areas of the Memorial, nor the documentation center, but I sketched the Wall as the light was fading, then took a tram out to Prenzlauerberg and back to the hotel.

After a late dinner of spaetzle from the hotel restaurant I walked back over to Hackescher Markt. All over Berlin, but especially around here where there had once been a large Jewish population, you find the ‘Stolpersteine‘, or ‘stumbling stones’, which are actually little square brass plaques in the pavement that are slightly raised so that you might trip on them, by design. Each has the names of people who lived there previously, usually Jewish but many Roma, homosexuals, disabled, who were removed or forced to flee by the Nazis, along with the year, how old they were, and their fate (you see ‘Ermordert in Auschwitz’ a lot). This is an initiative by the artist Gunter Demnig started in the 90s, and has now spread to many other cities commemorating victims of the Holocaust. Each of the Stolpersteine is handmade. Berlin makes sure it does not forget. I went back over to Hackesche Höfe and had a beer at the Cinema Cafe, which I sketched in the poor light. It is interesting that a lot of places in Berlin are cash only, where I got so used to using my card everywhere in Poland, same back in California. It wasn’t a busy evening, it was Tuesday, but it was an interesting cafe to sketch, and I used my fountain pen. The outside area of the cafe is in that alley with all the graffiti and would have been an interesting sketch, if I could find somewhere to sit with a good view, which I couldn’t. After this, tired, I went to bed.

On my last morning in Berlin, at the end of my Poland-Germany trip, I was ready to go back to London but had a last sketch or two in me. I had considered adding in a short trip to Denmark onto the end of this adventure, since it was 30 years since my strawberry-picking visit there, but decided a couple more days in London would be better for me. I had also considered taking the overnight train from Berlin to Brussels, a fairly new service, and passing a couple of days in my old Belgian haunts, but I’m glad I didn’t in the end. It was nice to spend some time by myself in Berlin but it’s not 1998 any more. I walked down to the Museum Island (sketching a man fishing in the Spree along the way) and sat next to the Dom, drawing the view of the Museums in pencil.

It is fun (and quick) to draw in pencil but I don’t really like straight lines much. I do love that sky though, and miss those wispy cloud skies. Before long I was back up in the wispy clouds myself, and sketched the view on my very small plane (see below). It was easy to get the S-Bahn out to the Brandenburg airport, but took a very long time getting through the security line, which seemed to have one line per baggage inspector and the inspector seemed to have to open up every single bag and inspect every single thing. I eventually had to ask them to let me through as I would miss my flight despite being there super early. Word of warning for you in Berlin airport, it can be slow. I flew back into a new airport for me though, London City Airport out past Docklands, a very small and convenient place to end up. I jumped right onto the DLR to Bank, and onto the Northern Line back home to Burnt Oak. Auf Wiedersehen Berlin, it was nice to reconnect after all these years. I would like to get back to Germany again soon, but I’d like to go back to the South and West again, maybe explore the Rhine Valley at last.

East Side

March 25, 2026March 23, 2026Leave a comment

I took the U-Bahn out to Warschauer Straße, a wide busy road well out into the East, full of hostels and clubs and new buildings. I was headed to the East Side Gallery, a famous stretch of the remaining Berlin Wall that separates Mühlenstraße from the banks of the river Spree. Popular with tourists, I’ve been here before, but almost didn’t recognize the other side of the street, now all built up with tall steel and glass hotels and apartments and businesses, plus a big modern concert arena, not like the concrete DDR era blocks and empty spaces I saw on my last visit. The East Side Gallery starts close to the Oberbaumbrücke, a decorative bridge over the Spree, and is the longest bit of Berlin Wall left standing. It was covered in artwork by over a hundred artists in 1990 after the Wall fell, and has been left as a testament to the fall of the DDR. Some of the artwork has stayed in place over the years, much of it has been updated or renovated, or even had new artwork put in place. Some sections have even come down, as Berlin has started redeveloping, but this is considered to be the largest open-air gallery in the world and contains some now famous paintings such as the one of Brezhnev and Honecker kissing, My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love by Russian painter Dmitri Vrubel. I stood and sketched the section above, showing Alles Offen (‘Anything Open’) by Rosemary Schinzler. I drew in pencil and watercolour (on that horrible bobbly Moleskine paper) and I likely had in mind the looser style of Detlef Surrey having been so inspired by his work at his talk. Plus it was just faster; I get bogged down with my penwork sometimes, and it’s good to be free; where better to be free than at the broken Berlin Wall. There were a lot of tourists about but it wasn’t crowded. I tried to find the spot where a photo of me was taken in 1998, and it was besides Wir Sind Ein Folk (‘We Are One People’ aka ‘Worlds People’) by Schamil Gimajew. I got someone to take a photo of me, so I could put them side by side. It’s clear that the original painting looks fairly different to the updated version, but still in that very distinctive style that I was so drawn to. The side by side photos are below. I remember we used a highly stylized black and white version of that photo in a poster for our small university production of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle (performed in German; I was Azdak the judge, the best possible character to play ever; that was a chaotic student production for our German Play course, in which I co-directed the first half, and designed the set to be projected on stage by one of those overhead projectors you get in schools, with extra characters drawn in pen and moved about alongside the real actors by me, it was very strange but we were on a budget and had to be creative…). Wir Sind Ein Folk is a really long piece and you could spend hours looking at all the details; there is more information about the piece and the artist on the East Side Gallery Exhibition website. Anyway here are the two photos, almost three decades apart (note the odd socks in the older one); I still stand in the same way.

After exploring the East Side Gallery I walked along the Spree, the Sun was out and I like to find the shade, so I stood next to a big boat (which was also a hostel; seemed like a fun place to stay, or maybe not, maybe 1998 Pete would have enjoyed it). I wanted to draw the long Oberbaumbrücke. I had intended to colour it in but couldn’t be bothered in the end. It is a double-decker bridge, and connects two neighbourhoods (Friedrichshain and Kreuzburg) that were divided by the Wall. This bridge was built in 1896, replacing an older wooden crossing, and has those two distinctive brick towers inspired by those in the city of Prenzlau. Updates were made following reunification. While I sketched, an American man started to chat with me, he was another sketcher who had been at the Symposium and was part of Urban Sketchers LA, Kevin Riley, really good sketcher, so now I’m following him on Instagram. It’s this whole thing about urban sketching, we get to recognize our people out in public, make connections.

Here’s another picture of me in Berlin in 1998 standing on the Oberbaumbrücke, with the Fernsehturm in the background. I had thought about taking one of those riverboats down the Spree, that would have been interesting. Can’t do it all though. After I finished the sketch of the bridge, I walked back over to busy Warschauer Straße, had a fairly gross tasting vegetarian currywurst at the station, and headed back to the hotel for a rest before seeing some more remains of the Berlin Wall before it got dark.

west side

March 24, 2026March 22, 2026Leave a comment

For my second full day in Berlin, I had a few things I wanted to do. You can’t do it all; I couldn’t for example go out to Charlottenburg, where I had never been; nor to Neukölln and Tempelhof, which had been recommended to me; nor out to Potsdam, which I had explored in ’98 anyway. Things always take longer when I have my sketchbook anyway, but I spent a bit of time going about on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn. I had a leisurely breakfast in my hotel room, sat looking out of the window and strumming on the uke, then headed out to West Berlin, to the Zoobahnhof, the busy shopping street of Kurfürstendamm, and to the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church) at Breitscheidplatz. I was covering old ground; this is one of the first places I visited in 1998 on the day I explored the city on my own. It is the shell of a large bombed out church, with the more modern church structure next to it, a large concrete edifice made up of small windows of stained glass. The older building stands as a monument to the destruction of war, and there is an exhibit of its history inside, along with an iron nail cross from Coventry Cathedral, also destroyed by aerial bombing in the war. The two cathedrals have held a long friendship together. The original church was not that old, having been built by Kaiser Wilhelm II in the last years of the 19th century, opening in 1906. The new church doesn’t look much from the outside, but inside the largely blue windows create a thrilling effect as they surround the space, it reminded me of Liverpool Catholic Cathedral, though this is a Protestant church. I had always thought (probably someone told me when I went there years ago) that the glass was recovered from the original building, but that is not the case, the glass in fact being designed by Gabriel Loire. That makes more sense, I think that when clearing up they probably weren’t saying “collect all those little bits of glass, ja, that might come in handy”. I really enjoyed sitting in the new church and sketching, something about all that blue really calms you down. I also liked the design of the floor, all colourful circles. There is a big golden Christ with a long face flying above the altar; it’s actually made from a bronze alloy metal called tombac and designed by Karl Hemmeter. I sketched in there (below) before sitting outside and sketching the old and new, above.

This is the commercial hub of the city and it feels like it, the Capitalist island in the old Communist sea; I remember that road map of Europe I had when I was a kid, West Germany was fully detailed, but only major cities were shown in the otherwise blank East Germany, except for those three autobahns that went from the West directly into the isolated West Berlin, with little warnings telling motorists they were not allowed to leave the road. According to that old road map, East Germany was a place that geographically didn’t exist. In his talk at the symposium, Detlef Surrey said that you got used to living with the Wall and the fact that there was this other place just over there, but that you mostly didn’t think about them, or maybe were encouraged not to. It was a different time, but I wonder about modern Korea, where you can say the Berlin Wall still exists, how do the people in the South think about those in the North. Germany is all one now, ever since 1990, but I hear many Germans say that it still feels like two, those divisions from decades ago and the years of change afterwards were a lot to expect to just heal. Was Germany ever really one? I always think about the north-south divide (sometimes called the Weißwurstäquator, depending on the type of sausage you might eat in different parts of the country), and the division between mostly Protestant and mostly Catholic regions, but in truth Germany as a federal nation has always been made up of very diverse places with differing histories. It’s a country and a language (all the different varieties) that has intrigued me since I was a kid, it is not a monolithic block. I would like to really explore it in more detail, but as I said, I don’t have time to go everywhere, mostly I’ll just draw the old buildings, and I don’t even eat sausages, well not pork ones. I was thinking of the old East-West as I walked around here though, since it had not changed as much as the other side had since my last visit in the 90s. I walked through the mall to find the toilet, and half expected to see posters of Hasselhoff in record shop windows. While we are talking retro, below is another photo of me in the 90s, posing like Bono with someone else’s sunglasses down in the Zoo station. Check out the little beard thing I had then, that is how you can tell it was the 90s. I took a photo of that sign as I pass through, it hadn’t changed much.

I had planned to take a wander through the Tiergarten. I wasn’t planning to go to the Zoo itself, who has time for that, but I love a massive park. This one is pretty big, and I only covered a small part of it. I started drawings some old lamp-posts, which were from all over the German-speaking world, plus some from other countries, a really interesting display of civic artistry all hidden together in this corner of Berlin. It was well past lunchtime now, and I was feeling hungry so decided to find the S-Bahn station and go back to the hotel for a rest before exploring the East Side. I wish I had been reading a novel set in Berlin, and that time passed a lot more slowly, to sit in the park or on the S-Bahn reading would have been perfect. As it was, I was still reading Agatha Christie’s Lord Edgware Dies (spoiler alert by the way) and it was taking me forever, because I’m a painfully slow reader.

Prenzlauerberg

March 23, 2026March 22, 20262 Comments

After a short rest at the hotel, I got back to exploring Berlin. I got on the U-Bahn at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and went a couple of stops up to Eberswalder Straße, a station above ground in the busy Prenzlauerberg district. I had struggled to remember exactly where I stayed on that trip to Berlin in 1998, just remembering that it was somewhere in East Berlin, where there was a busy intersection and an U-Bahn station above ground with some magnificent ironwork. I looked in my old journal from that trip – instead of bringing guidebooks that would weigh down my bag I simply got a notebook, filled it with information from each book, copies of maps and metro systems, and left space at the back to write a journal of the trip, five weeks around Europe on the trains. No smartphones in those days. I had kept a separate journal for more detailed and personal writing (lot of time to write on trains and in hostels) but in my main one I wrote down when I arrived and left, what I did, who I met and where I stayed. When I went to Berlin, it was not from an overnight train but a shorter journey from the pretty city of Lübeck where I had slept for a couple of nights at a hostel, and had met a couple of Australians called Pete and Kat who were also going to berlin the next day. We went together, and after arriving at Zoobahnhof we were right away being approached by people offering places to stay at hostels or otherwise. This it turns out was very normal especially in the Eastern European cities, and Berlin I suppose was the furthest East I’d been yet (in my life). An older woman called Frau Wurst (Mrs. Sausage) offered to rent us her small apartment for a few days, and being in our fearless early 20s we all said yeah why not. This was many years before the concept of AirBNB. She took us on a bus, getting angry with the ‘Wessis’ (who were very rudely just minding their own business and not bothering her at all) for sitting in the front seats upstairs, she was scolding and scowling at them, to their (and our) confusion. I learned that ‘Wessis’ were West Berliners and ‘Ossis’ were East Berliners, and Frau Wurst it seemed was no fan of a Wessi. Me and my two new friends who were both Aussies (not to confuse things) just looked at each other like, what have we got ourselves into here? Frau Wurst told us all about Berlin from the top of that bus, all in German that I translated for the two Australians as best I could, and especially about life following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I learned about ‘Ostalgie’, the nostalgia for the life in the old DDR. It was an education. We ended up in the area which I now realize was Prenzlauerberg, and I wrote down the address in my little journal so that decades later I would remember where it was we stayed – Schliemannstraße. Frau Wurst told us how she had lived in the flat before the Wall fell, and then after German Reunification she suddenly had to start paying rent and had all these other unexpected living expenses, so she converted the flat to rent out to tourists and was making extra money that way during the summer. It was the 90s though, so instead of posting online she had to literally go to the station and talk to people getting off the train. She had a fascinating story and I’m really glad we met her and stayed up there, as it was an interesting and convenient place from where to explore Berlin, but it still felt like two cities with two vibes. Not so much any more. I walked around the neighbourhood, finding the street where I had stayed with two Australians all those years before. It was different, very busy, diverse, lots of cafes and shops, and I sat outside a fast food joint on the corner and sketched the view of the station while Berliners whizzed past on e-bikes.

*Me and a Trabant in Prenzlauerberg in 1998*

Everywhere I had read told me that Prenzlauerberg had gone very upmarket and was one of the trendier parts of Berlin, but I didn’t feel that so much. Buildings were covered in graffiti, which seemed more the norm in Berlin that other cities anyway and it added character, but it was scruffier than expected, but again I didn’t mind that. I walked to a little park that cuts across Schliemannstraße, where people were playing games, reading, talking, walking their dogs and in my case, sketching a big green metal water pump, which had a dragon’s head for a tap. I found a nice bookshop opposite the park and had a look around in there (no sign of Detlef Surrey’s book), and wandered about a little bit more before heading over to Mauerpark. I found one of those Photoautomats, the old-school instant photo booths found all over Berlin that all the hipsters want to find. I had to have a go (see below). In the first couple I didn’t realize it was even working properly, in the third I held up my sketchbook, and in the last one I held up my blue plastic ukulele that I’d brought along to play while sat in the park.

Mauerpark is a grassy space just a short walk from Eberswalder Straße. As the name suggests, it is a park next to what was a stretch of the Berlin Wall, and was part of the infamous ‘Death Strip’. These days it’s a lively park where they hold a flea market and regular open-air karaoke, but there are always people spraying new graffiti designs on the stretch of concrete on tope of the steep embankment. I sketched the wall and listened to a group of four teenage artists debate over what to paint and how, the familiar sound of cans being shaken and music being played over tinny speakers. One of the kids said that he could not be out too long as his mother had called him home for dinner. I found it fascinating watching the street artists at work, and I sketched that part of the wall before sitting on the steps strumming my ukulele as the sun started to go down. A pretty good evening in Berlin.

I took the tram back to Eberwalder Straße and walked about a little more, checking out the Kulturbrauerei (finding another little Photoautomat, above), before deciding to grab some groceries at the supermarket and head back to the hotel. It was dark by now, and I was hungry. I ended up going for a late dinner at the much more Bavarian Hofbräuhaus, near Alexanderplatz, where I had a hige liter-sized ‘Maß’ of Bavarian beer and some schnitzel, while listening to some Bavarian oom-pah music (not very Berlin but very fun), and trying not to overhear the conversation an Irish man was having with his date behind me, I say conversation, more like monologue. I tried to sketch it all in pencil, Monday night in Mitte. And then, home to bed.

through the heart of Berlin

March 22, 2026Leave a comment

When I’m so behind in posting my sketches it is overwhelming to think of how much catch up there is, but then I remember that I’m looking back on my adventures from last summer, and it’s sometimes good to reflect on them when they are less fresh so you have had the time to digest them. Berlin is a lot to digest all at once, especially if you are mostly digesting by going around drawing it all. Berlin is a city with a lot of stories, and you can’t draw it all, and you can’t absorb it all. All those stories go through your head as you stand and look at them and try to make sense of things. You see how things are in the present day and you see how easily things went from one situation to another situation so quickly in the past and you think, well of course we should look at the past. Right now we are living in other peoples’ past. I remember feeling this very strongly the first time I was in Berlin, back as a scrawny 22 year old student dashing about Europe on night trains, feeling like this was a city coming to the end of the twentieth century where there were a lot of open wounds, but that it was about to become a different city again. Almost three decades later I was back with a more accomplished sketching habit to take a look around, and on this day I left my hotel near Alexanderplatz and walked down towards the MuseumInsel, which I’d explored the evening before with Omar. I sat in the grassy square outside the huge green-copper-domed Cathedral (Berliner Dom), which was peaceful except for the gangs of young women with indeterminate accents approaching people from all angles with clipboards. You see those gangs in many cities, they really want your signature for something or other, and your wallet too when you let them get too close. You have to keep these obvious pickpockets away from you, and I had to tell them to go away several times, eventually telling them to f-off, but I could see them going up to people all around the square. I was feeling pretty relaxed though, and was really happy with my drawing of the Dom with the Fernsehturm in the background. The cathedral itself has a long history going back to the 1400s, and has had several different iterations, but the present building designed by Julius and Otto Raschdorff was inaugurated in 1905. I didn’t go inside. It was a nicely overcast day, perfect for sketching where I’m not bound by looking for shade, and I think this was my favourite building sketch of the trip, drawn in the portrait sized Hahnemuhle, two page spread.

I was going to walk all the way down towards the Brandenburg Gate, but it was a long walk down Unter den Linden and there is an U-Bahn that goes all the way down it now. I love travelling on metro systems in other cities, it’s a whole new level of concentration. Berlin’s system is easy enough, the U-Bahn underground intermingled with the S-Bahn above, but that didn’t stop me getting lost a few times, or getting on a train in the complete wrong direction more than once, taking longer to mess about in stations than it would have taken me to actually walk the short distance. It was easy enough to get from the shiny Unter den Linden station down to the U-Bahn station formerly known as Unter den Linden but now called Brandenburger Tor.

The Brandenburg Gate is for many the most well-known architectural symbol of Berlin, especially of my generation and before who lived in the Cold War era. This was that big ghostly gate, stranded in the no-man’s-land between the Berlin Wall, which we Westerners could only see the back side of. It was on the news a lot when I was a kid. I remember the strange thrill of being able to walk through it when I went in ’98, less than nine years after the Wall fell, while souvenir sellers hawked old Soviet and DDR era army hats and badges. It used to be at the very real and dangerous dividing line between two worlds. I was planning to see more of the old Berlin Wall locations on this trip, inspired by Detlef Surrey’s presentation on his book (which I now have) and the stories he told about his younger life living next to the Wall. The Brandenburger Tor was built in 1791 during the height of the Kingdom of Prussia. Since the Wall fell it has been a symbol of German and European peace and unity. I stood in Pariser Platz, tourists all around taking photos, a man on a platform talking about something or other political, tour guides (‘Tor’ guides?) pointing out the window at the nearby Hotel Adlon where Michael Jackson once dangled his baby (remember that?), and I sketched the gate and the people milling about. I always feel a little awkward sketching columns, I have always felt that life is too short to draw columns, but I just don’t like drawing straight lines. When I was done admiring it all, I walked through the gate and into what used to be called West Berlin.

I had to sketch it again from the other side. I have a photo of me from that trip back in 1998 looking young and skinny, standing with this view in the background. there’s the picture below, along with another of the young me sitting where the Wall once stood (with the sort of look on my face that you see in YouTube thumbnails with clickbait headlines like “Berlin: Was It Bad?”). The view has not changed that much really, though my poor eyesight and short memory led to me write ‘Hotel Adler’ above the Hotel Adlon. There’s the Fernsehturm, finding a way to get into every sketch. Traffic rushed by this busy junction, and the massive Tiergarten park loomed behind me full of trees and joggers. I had thought about getting up in the morning and having a run through the Tiergarten, but decided against it. It’s really big.

So I walked down Ebertstraße towards Potsdamer Platz, following the line of the old Wall, but first I was going to visit somewhere which was both moving and chilling, the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’, also known as the Holocaust Memorial. Berlin does not turn its face away from the dark past, and the location of this huge memorial space is significant, nearby the Reichstag, on an area which used to be part of the infamous Death Strip inside the Berlin Wall, and close to where Hitler’s bunker was located. The memorial looks like a filed of smooth grey concrete blocks all lined up in symmetrical rows, appearing to move up and down as the ground level gets deeper and the slabs get taller. It resembles a graveyard, a colourless crop field, a grey grid system city that feels like a labyrinth; the designer Peter Eisenman left it open to interpretation. As you enter the monument the concrete blocks are short, resembling tombs, and children jump from one to the other, though they are not supposed to. The further you walk down each corridor, the taller the blocks get until they tower above you and everything feels…cold. There are people around, but you feel isolated. You might see them pass by ahead or behind, quickly in and out of view (reminding me of that scene in Yellow Submarine), leaving you along again. The rows may be meant to put you in mind of the lines of Jews being led into the camps or onto the transports, and you feel trapped inside this grey world seeing the sky above that can’t be reached. I felt a bit scared in there, not that anything would happen to me, but that the feeling of isolation descended so fast. It is not a labyrinth, every path is a way out, but it was easy to feel suddenly lost. It was sunny when I emerged and I needed a rest. I sketched the Memorial, with the green Tiergarten away to the left, the glass dome of the Reichstag and the solid block of the U.S. Embassy in the background.

It was a longer walk than expected to get to Potsdamer Platz; perhaps I was just tired. The day was already getting away from me, and I hadn’t eaten lunch. The last time I was in Potsdamer Platz it was just a building site, the biggest in Europe, but now it was all big modern buildings and infrastructure. The train station was complicated; you had to go back outside the find the U-Bahn, I decided to go back to the hotel for a rest before I did any more exploring. That was a lot of history for a small area.

Back To Berlin

March 16, 20262 Comments

Ok, a month of not posting (I went to England) but let’s get back to last summer before this summer comes around. After Poland, I spent a few days in Berlin, a city long on my go-to-and-sketch list (a list that includes all of the cities, but some are nearer the top than others, like Berlin). I was last there in 1998, which may as well have been in a different century. Which it turns out it was. I was staying in Mitte, in a hotel not far from Alexanderplatz, a good central location to explore from, but in the heart of the old East Berlin. This was a changed city from the last time I was there, but so am I. I arrived by crowded train from Poznan, which was headed for the Hauptbahnhof (a station that wasn’t even there in 1998) but ended up diverting to a different station at the last minute, confusingly. It was all good in the end. I got to my hotel, and then met up with fellow Urban Sketcher Omar Jaramillo, who has lived in Berlin for many years now. He showed me around on an extensive walking tour of the city centre, giving me all the histories and showing me all the details that I might have missed on my own. That was really great, and a nice introduction to the city before my sketching adventure (plus Omar’s awesome and I’ve been a big fan of his art since the first days of USk). I didn’t sketch him though! The first sketch I did of Berlin was the one above, of the massive Fernsehturm. The iconic TV Tower which can be seen from all over Berlin, a real Ost-Berlin landmark. I didn’t go up this time. I thought about it. I did go up in 1998, and there was a revolving restaurant up there. I love big telecommunications towers. I drew the BT Tower while I was in London as well. In the foreground there is St.Marienkirche. I stood out on Karl-Liebknechtstrasse as it was getting dark and looked up. Birds were circling the steeple. I had to remind them this was not a 1970s art film. When I was done I went to a small restaurant near the hotel and ate some spaetzle (which was not very good) and had a beer (which was also not good). Ah well, can’t win them all.

I got up and it was Monday. I had two entire full days on my own just to wander the whole of Berlin sketching what I can. I had a rough idea of where I wanted to go, but all the best Berlin stories start with a meeting under the big World Time Clock, Die Weltzeituhr, at Alexanderplatz. I wasn’t meeting anyone but myself on this day, and I was late, so while I waited I sketched. Those yellow streetcars hummed along dodging stray pedestrians, and the base of the Fernsehturm can be seen behind the big arch of Alexanderplatz station. I love this sketch. It was not that early in the morning, and the sky was threatening some light rain, but people were out and about and the city moved around me. I didn’t see any people meeting underneath the clock, unless they were spies, in which case good job lads, I never noticed you. I probably wouldn’t have been a good Cold War spy, I’m too obvious standing there with my sketchbook, or maybe that’s the most genius spy design. Anyway before we start my journey through Berlin, here are some other Berlin things I drew that I though I should share here.

If you have been to Berlin you will recognize these, the Ampelmännchen, which were the old East German street crossing lights that have become a big symbol of Berlin. You can’t move for tourist tack featuring the green Ampelmann in his hat and the red Ampelmann with his arms outstretched. And I couldn’t get enough of it, I bought the lot, even got Ampelmann socks, candies, stickers, one of those plastic reflective things you put on your bike, I loved them. When I did that 1998 trip I took notice of these, and the street-crossing signs, in many of the countries I visited, and drew them in my journal. Seeing these everywhere reminded me of that obsession. I don’t care, I love street furniture. Speaking of which, below is a fire hydrant from Alexanderplatz. Like London these are mostly underground and have to be brought up.

And finally, a sketch of the Fernsehturm that I did the next morning while looking out of my hotel bedroom. I stayed at the Lux on Rosa-Luxemburgstrasse, nice hotel but very slow elevators, especially when I need the loo. It was a lot sunnier that day and I ate breakfast in my room and played my blue ukulele a bit while watching the city. I sketched, and made the decision to add a little paint, golden yellow and turquoise blue, but unfortunately it was on that horrible new Moleskine paper and didn’t have the effect I was after. Still, I had a nice time drawing it. See you in the next post…