I walked over from Fitzrovia to Marylebone. London is just a big collection of villages they say, I mean they are quite big villages with lots of big expensive buildings. When a man is tired of London, he is tired of cliches about London. That said, I lied exploring this part of town, which I don’t really ever come to. In the case of Marylebone High Street, I don’t remember ever coming here. I must have when I was young, I remember doing a job at a big upstairs-downstairs type house around here, when I was a waiter in my teens, serving tea and sandwiches, but I didn’t explore the area. So finally in 2025 I decided to wander through, do some sketching, and visit Daunt Books. I’d seen pictures of the place, and of course those little bags everyone likes that have the drawing of the bookshop on it. I was asked once by another bookshop here in California if I could do a drawing for a similar bag ‘just like the Daunt Books one in London’ but I didn’t have time to do that. I made sure to pick up one of these famous bags (they aren’t cheap, I got a small one for my book purchases that day). I didn’t realize it’s primarily a travel bookshop, but carries all sorts of other books and literature as well, but everything was organized by geographical location. Not just the guidebooks and phrasebooks, you would expect that, but novels too. I was looking in the Berlin section, ahead of my trip there, and all the novels that were set in Berlin were to be found there. I liked that a lot, it made more sense. It was a big store to explore, but a bit of a squeeze upstairs. I sketched it from across the street, and added only the green which made a lot of sense. That woman entering the shop probably wasn’t wearing the same green as the lamps, but maybe she was. Maybe she didn’t exist and I just needed to draw a generic person walking into the bookshop. It was busy, Saturday afternoon in Marylebone, lots of shoppers out, people standing outside the pubs, and expensive cars pulling up and people in expensive clothes with expensive haircuts speaking expensive languages, it’s quite an upmarket village. Yet it still felt like an active neighbourhood, and there were little places of calm. I went up to Paddington Street Gardens South, a little park in the middle of Marylebone, and sat for a while in the calm under the trees.

I walked over to the Monocle Cafe, I wanted to sketch it since I saw another artist I follow (whose name escapes me now) do a really nice drawing of it several years ago. Also, I have a friend (who I haven;t seen for years) who has worked at Monocle, the magazine, since it first launched almost twenty years ago now. I still have somewhere the first edition that he mailed over to me. It’s a really good magazine, focusing on culture and travel and all sorts of stuff, but admittedly not one I read regularly, it’s quite big and I don’t buy magazines as often as I used to (except the occasional history or football magazine which I get from Newsbeat, and sometimes the one about ukuleles). They would always end up piling up around the house, not wanting to throw them away until I’d read all of it, which I never did. I still buy magazines more than most people I know though, and almost always British magazines (American magazines are terrible, they weigh a ton, there are far too many advertisements, and finding the actual articles is like trying to solve an escape room). This is a nice little cafe, tucked away on the quiet Chiltern Street. They have other cafes in cities like Zurich, Paris, Hong Kong, as well as shops, all connected to the magazine. This one is very pretty and sketchable though, but it being the end of the day, I kept it pretty simple, as I had to get the tube home. One of the staff came over to check out the sketch and offered me a drink, but I had to go soon. Some ladies from the middle east were very excited to see the sketch and I think they wanted to be in it, but I just let them pretend one of them were the figures inside (they weren’t) and they took photos. I was pretty tired though, and this was all I had left in me to sketch (I’d already drawn two pubs, one bookshop, the BT Tower and had three beers since Hampstead, it was time to go home for dinner). I saw all sorts of other places I’d like to sketch or explore around here, such as Marylebone Lane, and even Baker Street underground station so will be coming back at some point, when I’m next in London.