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.