Here’s the last of the London drawings I did after our trip, and this one was drawn on the very day that the shop itself closed. This is I Camisa and Son, a little deli and Italian foods store on Old Compton Street, in the heart of old Soho. I’ve got this one on my wall now and I look at it as I go up the stairs and think about that old neighbourhood, and how much it has changed, evolved, but it’s still a place full of characters and community. I’ve heard news of its expected closure for a few years, despite the reported support of the landlords, business had just not been so good since the pandemic. Closure was staved off a couple of years ago, but this summer it seemed that they just couldn’t make it. According to their website they will try to find another location. Sixty years they were here, another little bit of Italian Soho. The decline of regular workers in local offices led to a decline in the lunchtime business. I cannot say I really went there much myself, except to pop in and get a cold drink maybe, but then again I have lived in California for the past two decades so I have an excuse. When I lived in London I would come to Old Compton Street a fair bit, usually in the evenings, and this was just another place that’s always been there, a place you just take for granted. There are so many places that we took for granted that are now gone, usually replaced with The Nothing. It made me sad to hear about this though. I have sketched half of the shop before, when I sketched the Cafe Espana next door (now gone). Years ago my friend Rob lived in a flat down here (in that narrow Tisbury Court alley that leads to Berwick Street) and I spent the night quite a few times, usually after an evening at the Ship, and breakfast down Old Compton was always nice. Back in the mid-90s I used to have an Italian friend who worked in one of those really old amusement arcade places on Wardour Street, the one with the big Las Vegas sign just a stone’s throw from here, and we would meet other Italians at the Intrepid Fox (long gone) and at Bar Italia (still here). There were always lots of Italians in Soho. It was always really cosmopolitan though, London, centuries before, the French Huguenot refugees settled on Old Compton. There’s a lot of music history down here too; right next door used to be the 2is Coffee Bar, which according to the plaque was considered the birthplace of British Rock’nRoll. I’ve often thought about doing a book of sketches just from Old Compton, but with so many changes, I’m missing the boat. I don’t like drawing historical sketches, of The Way Things Used To Be, so that’s why it was important to me that I drew this on the last day of its existence, even though I wasn’t there to draw it in person. But then, whatever replaces it, a Boba Tea shop or a Frozen Yoghurt seller, maybe in sixty years time when they are still going they will be the venerable old characters of Old Compton. You never know.