an afternoon in hampstead

January 13, 2026January 12, 2026Leave a comment

From Hemel Hemstead to regular old Hampstead, a place I’m a lot more familiar with. It was a nice summery day, and we went a few stops down the old Northern Line to look around. I did a quick sketch of Heath Street looking uphill past the tube station. These quick pen sketches while I’m waiting for people are often my favourite types, getting as much in as quickly as I can in a busy city. I love taking my time but dashing with a fountain pen is very liberating. I picked up a new book in Primrose Hill this summer by the artist David Gentleman called ‘Lessons for Young Artists’, a signed copy full of simple but powerful advice. I know, I know I’m not a ‘Young Artist’, but hey I’m significantly younger than David Gentleman so comparatively I still qualify. I’m a huge fan of David Gentleman; his book ‘London You’re Beautiful has pride of place on my shelf, and I look through it more than most books. I don’t often draw in a looser sketching style like he does, but when I do it feels like I’ve caught a bit more of how I really see London. It’s not static or linear, but organic and full of often incompatible personalities. London annoys me, but I can’t get enough of it, I don’t live there any more but my head is always in its space. The tree below, a huge London Plane in the shaded backstreet of Oriel Place is one of my favourite trees in London. We sat for a while eating our crepes, I did a quick sketch.

We walked down to St. John-at-Hampstead church down Church Row, looked about for a bit, then I stayed down and did some sketching, drawing the tall house next to the graveyard that comes right out of an old novel. This street has had a lot of celebrated residents. H.G. Wells (he of the Time Machine) lived at number 17; Giles Gilbert Scott (he of the red phone box) lived number 26. Peter Cook also lived at number 17 in the 1960s, and would write here with Dudley Moore, as well as hosting parties. Famous scientist Henry Cavendish lived at number 34; he discovered Hydrogen, though he called it ‘inflammable air’ (he got that right). The most well-known resident of number 12, which I drew, was a 19th century Christian Socialist called Edward Vansittart-Neale, who opened the first co-op store in London. Everybody needs good neighbours. It’s very picture-book Hampstead around here, the sort of place a main character walks down in a soppy movie before bumping into a rich American out walking a small dog and spilling their big coffee before opening a small antiques shop or bookstore and we’ve all seen those films. It’s nice down here though. I drew the graveyard a couple of years ago.

st.mary’s in hemel

January 12, 20261 Comment

This is St. Mary’s Church in Hemel Hempstead, which is a town in Hertfordshire outside of London which I had never been to before. I was up in Stevenage at my younger sister’s, and was planning to meet my friend James in the evening. Usually when we meet he comes into central London and gets the train back from there, this time I suggested we meet in Hemel and I finally get to see where he lives now (he’s from Watford originally, a little bit closer to London). We had some curry and beers in the old town, nice to catch up, and I stayed over at the house he and his wife own, I last saw them both in California last March when they were visiting San Francisco for their anniversary. Next morning I was up early, and before heading back to London on the train (a longer journey than I realized! Hertfordshire is bigger than I thought, and I grew up right next to it not thinking about it much), I walked back up to the old town and drew the churchyard we had walked through the evening before. St. Mary’s is a really old church, this building dating back to the middle of the twelfth century. There was likely a church here for much longer than that, it may even be where King Offa of Mercia was buried, though his grave is now lost. King Offa, there was someone who couldn’t be refused. Although in retrospect, cheap puns on his name probably should be. The tall pointing spire, too big to be included in this format of sketchbook, was added in the fourteenth century and for a long time was the tallest in Europe. The church contains a memorial to the 18th century surgeon and anatomist Sir Astley Cooper, who lived nearby. Unlike many disreputable anatomists of that time who employed body-snatchers or ‘resurrection men’, Sir Astley’s catchphrase was ‘Never gonna dig you up’. It was a really peaceful churchyard, next to a narrow park, and joggers and morning strollers passed me by as I sketched, only mildly hungover from the previous night’s trip to the local pub. Hemel Hempstead is commuter country, a place where people move out to from London while rebounding back in and out to work, like many other towns within an hour or so of the city. It’s bigger than I thought, with this enormous roundabout-within-a-roundabout system, nicknamed the ‘Magic Roundabout’, that functions like an Agatha Christie novel, full of twists and turns and red herrings, maybe a body in the library. There’s the old town, which had some interesting old buildings, and the New Town, a post-war development with a pedestrianized shopping district that reminds me of other such towns in England, with their 1950s concrete and shallow waterways, and made me feel oddly nostalgic for places I’ve never even lived. I didn’t spend much time here but it was quite nice overall, wish I’d sketched a bit more but glad I drew the old church.

Burnt Oak Broadway, corner of Stag Lane

January 10, 2026January 9, 2026Leave a comment

Here are a couple of drawings from Burnt Oak that I did last summer. Specifically, Burnt Oak Broadway. I mentioned in a previous post that Edgware High Street was part of Edgware Road which is part of Watling Street which was an ancient Roman Road running from Dover to Wroxeter, passing through London and running in a north-westerly straight line, give or take. The A5, in modern parlance. It was probably a route before the Romans came as well, used by the ancient Britons, and we don’t really know what it was called before the Saxons migrated here from mainland Europe and called it Watling Street, or Wæcelinga Stræt, after a tribe that lived around what we call St. Alban’s now, the people of Waecla, or Waeclingas. Watling Street also marked the border between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms under Alfred and the Viking-ruled territory of the Danelaw. Our side of the street, in Burnt Oak, that would have been in the Danelaw, which explains a few things about us (what’s the Old Norse for “yeah what you looking at, come on then”), with our longships and our Odins, while those posh Saxons lived over there in Harrow with their burnt cakes and their Wodens. Burnt Oak is where I was born and grew up, and supposedly has its origins in Roman times (what’s the Latin for “yeah what you looking at, come on then”) and refers to the old practice of burning an oak tree to mark boundaries (a simple sign would have probably been easier). When we say we are going ‘Up the Watling’ we are not referring to Watling Street, but to Watling Avenue which turns downhill from here. This part of Watling Street, Edgware Road, the A5 whatever, is called Burnt Oak Broadway. Hey this is Britain, we can have as many names for things as we bloody well like. One summer morning I got up and walked up to the top of the Watling, and stood on Burnt Oak Broadway looking over at the junction with Stag Lane. This junction is ancient, and you could grow ancient waiting for the bloody lights to change, and is probably named after the Bald Faced Stag pub which would have been to my left on the Broadway before it was closed about a decade or so ago. All the old pubs are closing, there will be none left soon. There are none left around here. That’s a different story. The large building on the left with the clock on top has stood there for many years, and reminds me so much of being a kid. It was a department store for a long time, but it reminds me of my Nan, because I would see it when going to her flat, which was just across the street further down the Broadway, or in the Stag, where she would spend most days. Across the junction on Stag Lane, that building painted an ugly blue is now an amusement arcade and casino called Silvertime, well I say amusement, who really knows. It’s in the former location of Nat West Bank, and this was my branch when I opened my first account as a kid, do you remember those porcelain NatWest piggy banks? My mum or dad still have them somewhere I think. Sad to see the bank closed. There used to be two NatWests in Burnt Oak, both closed now. There is another blue Silvertime across the street, also located in a closed down bank, where the old Midland Bank (later HSBC) used to be. Funny how these casinos open in old banks. I really don’t know why they have to paint these old buildings bright blue though. Next door is a Romanian food market, and a restaurant next to that. There’s a sizeable Romanian community in Burnt Oak now, that was not there when I left. My mum did have a friend from Romania when I was a kid, she used to work with him and we would often meet with his family. He had escaped Ceaucescu’s brutal regime in the 70s or 80s (hiding in a box, apparently), and was able to bring his family over after that. I still remember when the communist regimes fell, and he was finally able to go and visit his homeland. Last time I saw him he had opened a bakery on Burnt Oak Broadway, about seventeen years ago just down from here, and he gave me a massive plate of pastries, but that’s gone now. Everything changes, you can’t stop it, but we’ve all got our stories in these places.

Further down the Broadway, opposite the flats where my Nan used to lived (when she wasn’t in the Stag), I stood under a tree and drew this on the morning before heading off on my trip to Poland. This building is in a sorry state, disused, boarded up. When I was younger it was a Mecca bingo hall, but closed more than ten years ago. We love leaving this big old buildings empty and derelict. Years ago it used to be a cinema, when my Mum was a girl, the Savoy, she remembers seeing Calamity Jane there as a kid. Someone contacted me to let me know that there are proposals to convert this space and the spaces next to it into new flats, with concerns about some more local history being lost to the march of redevelopment. Luxury flats are probably better than bright blue ‘adult gaming centres’, but London is at the mercy of big corporate property developers these days. Communities would be nice, and they still exist, if you want it. Pubs would be nice, and newsagents, and a post office, and banks with humans, and a cafe where you can get a nice cup of tea. It’s funny, I like drawing these big old buildings whose presence echoes so much through not only my own history but that of my family and local friends, yet I think I only ever stepped foot in here once in my life, when it was a bingo hall when I was a kid, and I am probably misremembering that for somewhere else. Memory and Nostalgia are funny things. I was considering writing a book called “I Remember When Things Used To Be A Little Bit Different From How They Are Now” but things keep changing and changing again. So I will just keep on drawing what I see, until it does. These were the only sketches I did in Burnt Oak in this trip but I did more around London, stay tuned for those, they won’t all come with maudlin’ nostalgic stories, but most will.

back to the railway hotel

January 9, 2026Leave a comment

The Railway Hotel in Edgware, at the end of the Northern Line in London, has been lying empty and boarded up for a long time now. It closed in 2006, twenty years ago, and it’s been in a sorry state ever since, even suffering a fire in 2016, which sometimes happens to old buildings that are in the way of new buildings. However it did survive, though it has spent the past decade with nobody sure of what will happen to it. However recent plans have been proposed to finally renovate the site as part of the lerger ‘Forumside’ development of the land behind it. That’s what it’s being called, Forumside, and this is that big plan to build tall towers with hundreds of flats, changing the look of Edgware, but the plan is that they will be keeping the Railway Hotel and restoring it, so we can still enjoy some older buildings in Edgware. Not that I live there any more, but I care what happens to this venerable old building, that goes back all the way to 1936. Ok yeah that’s not that old, you don’t have the ghost of Dick Turpin riding through here, but they don’t make pretend-old buildings like this any more. I stood in the graveyard of St. Margaret’s Church across Station Road, careful not to stand on anyone’s graves (I’m not superstitious, except when I definitely am, but I’m always careful where I tread in a graveyard). Those boarded up windows are sad, but it saves cleaning the windows. I love those big old chimneys. I remember going into the railway, it was a lovely pub and friendlier than most, and we had a nice dinner up there for my mate Terry’s 18th birthday (I remember his grandad making us laugh with his funny sayings). I drew the view below on the same day as the first sketch, just from a different angle so you can see more of the adjoining side building. It was that sky though, I loved drawing that last summer. Unfortunately that newer blend of Moleskine watercolour paper is not good at all and makes every wash look like it’s on textured bogroll, all those little bumps, this is why I have now stopped using the Moleskines, until they improve. I’m using Hahnemuhle now, which is much better.

I actually did draw it back in 2015 and wrote about it in a blog post ten years ago, where I lamented the ‘End of the Railway’ and noted that it was not a listed building. That’s what I was told at the time, but maybe it was listed (in 2003); it was added to the ‘Historic England’s At Risk Register‘ in 2013. Here’s the sketch I did in 2015. By the way if you’re on Facebook and talking about this building and you use my sketch, please ask me first, ffs. I drew that on Christmas Eve, I remember it, I think it was the last Christmas we even spent in London. We used to go over every other year for Christmas, but haven’t done so in years now. I’ve been over in November and December, but not for the big day itself. I remember going up to Edgware, last bit of shopping at M&S and WH Smiths the Boardwalk (both gone from there now), drawing the Railway Hotel, and then getting the 305 bus (a route which no longer exists) back to Burnt Oak to get ready for Father Christmas. I don’t think it snowed that year.

You can learn about the new plans for this building at: https://edgwarerailwayhotel.co.uk/. They have an artist impression of what it might look like (and I swear it looks like I’m sitting on a bench drawing it). Whatever ends up happening, I hope the Railway reopens with a new life, and these big mock Tudor triangles and tall chimneys stay on the Station Road for another century. Well ok they haven’t been here for one full century yet but you know what I mean. Stay tuned for more sketches from my big Summer 2025 trip back to Europe. These are the last of the Edgware ones, but there are a couple more from Burnt Oak to come.

highwaymen on the high street

January 5, 2026Leave a comment

Time to get on with 2025, because 2026 isn’t starting too well. So, let’s go back to last summer and my trip back across The Pond. Just around the corner from where we left off (“Edgware and its Ghosts“) is one of the oldest buildings in Edgware, having been here long before it became part of Metroland. If there are ghosts anywhere in Edgware, surely it would be here. This row next to the old War Memorial on the High Street, around the corner from Station Road, are some of the oldest buildings still standing in Edgware. These date from about the 16th Century, others on the row from the 17th and 18th. Hundreds of years ago this was a coaching inn on the Edgware Road, which is the old Roman road of Watling Street that runs north-west out of London in a straight line across England. Imagine the people that would have stayed here. One of them was reputedly the infamous highwayman Dick Turpin. I don’t know if he stayed there, but Turpin and his gang of thugs (the Essex Gang) did commit an extremely violent robbery at the nearby farm of Joseph Lawrence in 1735. I won’t recount the whole story, but Turpin was a horrible thug, not a dashing hunk on a horse. Still, we grew up knowing that Turpin spent time around here. Turpin time. I had a Dick Turpin ‘Wanted’ poster on my bedroom wall when I was a kid that I got on a school trip to York, where he was hanged. His ghost probably isn’t floating around here anywhere, in a tricorn hat and holding one of those flintlock pistols, but let’s say it is, what the hell. Highwaymen were a big thing back in the 18th century weren’t they, and they all had similar-themed names, your Dick Turpin, your Tom Cox, your Willy Plunkett, and there was also James Hind whose middle initial may have been B. These days the old coaching inn is a restaurant called Himalayan Spice. So it went from ‘ave a rest’ to ‘Everest’. They went from ‘mounting horses’ to just ‘mountains’. Sorry, these puns are much, much worse than usual. Wait I have one more, they went from ‘Stand and Deliver’ to ‘Sit-Down or Take-Away’. That’s not bad, I might use that if I ever eat there. I didn’t eat there this time, but did poke my head in the door, it’s still pretty historic looking inside (and the food smelled really good). I haven’t been in there since I was a kid. Back then it was an Italian restaurant, the Vecchia Romagna, and my mum actually worked there. This building will always be the Vecchia Romagna to me. I’m amazed I have never sketched it before now. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a waiter like the ones my mum worked with, tea-towel over the arm, white shirt, handful of plates. Then I got old enough to actually do that, and that’s how I earned my spending money as a teenager. Not here though, but in many places around Edgware and across north-west London, waitering jobs, serving tea and wine, laying tables, washing up. Even though I’m still alive, there’s probably a ghost of me floating around Edgware carrying a small teapot and a platter of vol-au-vents. Or a sketchbook, there will definitely be a ghost of me holding a sketchbook on the streets of Davis. Since ghosts don’t really exist I say you can choose to have loads of them in all different places, even when you are alive.

Hopefully I get around to posting the rest of my sketches from Edgware and Burnt Oak soon, because I have some more. This is a really interesting document from 2013 on the London Borough of Harrow website (because this side of the street is in Harrow, not Barnet), which goes into the history of this part of Edgware and focuses on a lot of the historic architectural details of these old buildings. I really should get around to sketching Whitchurch Lane, just around the corner from here, that has some really interesting old buildings. Next time.

that was the 2025 that was

January 4, 20261 Comment

Well, 2025 finally finished. That was exhausting, even more than expected. I expect 2026 will be more so. So far it is, but the new year doesn’t really begin until the decorations come down, or the new sketchbook is started. I tried hard to close out my current sketchbook by December 31st, but in the end I had a few pages left, I should easily finish that by December 6th. As for the amount of sketching I did in 2025, let’s just say it was more than more-than-ever. Perhaps there is a correlation between burying myself in my sketchbooks and the state of the world, yes I think there is. 2025 was a very bust year for my sketchbooks though, as you can see from above – the annual sketch list for 2025 this time split into two columns. It’s not a very scientific way of tracking my sketches (and I can really see how the rows started getting slightly bigger or smaller at points, when I thought they were all the same size, having used the same grid for more than a decade). However if you look at the chart below, where I show my annual sketching output since 2013 (again, not going back to do the years before then, that was just when I started to keep track like this), you can see that 2025 makes every other year pale in comparison. Even the massive years of 2019 and 2024 were left behind by 2025. There’s no way 2026 will be as big. For one thing, I have not even blog posted the second half of the sketches yet. Hey, I’ve been busy, and not had the headspace to write. I will get around to it, but the sketches have not stopped.

Here’s a summary of my art accomplishments in 2025 (this feels a little bit like I’m doing an evaluation at work): (a) Loads of sketching, (b) More sketching, and (c) Even more sketching. Looking back at last year’s summary of 2024, there were interviews and articles, and I don’t remember doing anything much like that in 2025. I did have a couple of drawings shown at the Pence Gallery’s annual Art Auction again. I did a lot of travelling – Washington DC, New York City, Pasadena, Portland, a month-long trip away to Europe which included London, Oxford, Berlin and Poland, plus a few trips down to San Francisco. The biggest art even was attending the annual Urban Sketching Symposium in Poznan, Poland, my first one since Amsterdam in 2019. I still need to write about all of that. I also had a brief show of my Burnt Oak sketches at a special event for the centenary of Burnt Oak tube station last March, though I couldn’t attend in person. It would be nice to do another for the centenary of the Watling Estate in 2026 but I don’t know I’ll be able to set that up; I have lots of ideas, but not lots of time. In Fall I led a weekly session of urban sketching on campus for first year students which was a new experience for me. I also started organizing monthly sketchcrawls again, reinvigorated by my time at the symposium in Poland. I did make one of my most ambitious advent calendars yet, the latest of many I have made for my teenager. One of the highlights was the last-minute trip to fly to Pasadena to watch Oasis at the Rose Bowl, that was unforgettable. And of course, as a Spurs fan, watching us win the Europa League from the comfort of my own couch, after 17 years Tottenham finally win a trophy, but it was a year of atrophy. I did a lot of reading this year, a lot of Agatha Christie and a ton of Terry Pratchett – 2025 was ten years since he died so . Also, I did second ever 10k race, and got a personal best time (after my watch stopped working 10 seconds into the run), 10 minutes faster than in 2023. My ambition this year – run a half marathon. We will see…

These are the sketchbooks I used in 2025, not including a few larger individual pieces:

SKETCHBOOK 59 – Landscape Hahnemühle A5 #2 – September 2025 to present – Davis, Corvallis (OR), Portland (OR)
SKETCHBOOK 58 – Portrait Hahnemühle A5 #1 – August 2025 to September 2025 – Oxford, London, Gdańsk, Poznań, San Francisco, Pasadena, Davis
SKETCHBOOK 57 – Landscape Watercolour Moleskine #29 – August 2025 – London, Gdańsk, Poznań (Poland), Berlin (Germany).
SKETCHBOOK 56 – Landscape Hahnemühle A5 #1 – May 2025 to August 2025 – Davis, San Francisco, London, Oxford (UK).
SKETCHBOOK 55 – Landscape Watercolour Moleskine #28 – March 2025 to May 2025 – Davis, San Francisco, Washington DC, New York
SKETCHBOOK 54 – Landscape Watercolour Moleskine #27 – December 2024 to March 2025 – Davis, Sacramento, San Francisco
Small Seawhite Landscape Sketchbook – February 2025 to July 2025 – Davis, San Francisco, Washington DC, New York, various airports; mostly travel and quick people sketches.
Small Brown Stillman & Birn Sketchbook – August to October 2025 – London, Gdańsk, Poznań, San Francisco, Pasadena, Davis, Portland; mostly quick people sketches.
Small Grey Stillman & Birn Sketchbook – October 2025 to present – Davis

2026 is going to be busy but I’m still tired from 2025, so perhaps trying not to be too ambitious, but still a bit ambitious would be good. Will I ever work on that book? My resolution is to really try to write more, which has been hard in a world where words are flying around like shrapnel. I want to travel, but also to rest, and read more, a lot more. I will turn a big significant age this year. Ok 2026, let’s get on with it.