I think I sought out quieter spots on this London trip, I wasn’t really looking for the busy crowds and bustle of the city, it’s been too stressful a year for that. I found myself in Hampstead a few times, only a few stops down the Northern Line from Burnt Oak, but a world away in how it looks. It’s a bit nice round there. We went down one afternoon to walk about a bit, before I would be meeting up with a friend in the evening for dinner. I had a bit of time to myself to go and do some sketching, and I stood on Fitzjohn’s Avenue and sketched this weathered old post box (below), which bore the royal cipher of King Edward VII, so it’s quite old. I love old pillar boxes. I saw one from Queen Victoria’s reign on Hampstead High Street, although it was kept as a relic and was not in actual use (despite being opposite the post office). My brother called me up, and as I spoke to him I found myself wandering down old streets I had never been to, not really paying much attention to where I was going. I found myself at the Parish Church of St. John at Hampstead, an impressive old church with an adjacent burial ground, rows of gravestones poking out of long grass. It was quite peaceful, and I do like a graveyard. Real England is old brick and stone and greenery. Local ladies walked their small dogs about, and I sketched this scene above. I felt it had to be in pencil. If I still lived in London I would probably spend a lot more time sketching graveyards.

On a different day, I came through Hampstead to pick up some photos I had put in to Snappy Snaps on Hampstead High Street a few days before to be developed. That’s right, an actual roll of film. I haven’t developed a roll of film in nearly 20 years, and in fact I still have some rolls of undeveloped film that I brought with me when I emigrated to America, memories still waiting to jump out at me from the past. Well this roll of film was from just the past few months. A friend got me a basic film camera for Christmas, and so I bought some film (not cheap any more like the old days!) and was taking pictures on some of our recent travels. I maybe got the film wrong (it was good quality and cost me enough), but the photos turned out terrible. Like almost unanimously awful. The ones in Zion Canyon for example were just big dark masses. It wasn’t cheap to develop either, but there you go. Fun experiment, I suppose, but I’ll stick to digital, and sketching. My son was using the film camera on our Europe trip this time, so we will see how they turn out. Better than mine, I hope. Anyway, on my way back to the tube, after stopping in Cass Arts to pick up yet another sketchbook (I never seem to not need sketchbooks), I stopped in Flask Walk to draw. The sketch is below. I like Flask Walk, it’s narrow and full of interesting little shops. I like the Flask pub, I usually pop in there when I’m back in London. When my son was little, I took him ghost hunting there, because it is supposed to be one of those haunted pubs London has so many of. I like all the little antique shops, though I’m not the sort of person who shops at antique shops. I stood nearby and drew the view looking down, trying to catch some of the things people were saying to each other, like the older woman saying “bye darling! bye darling!” to her friend. I got asked by someone passing by if they could take my photo while sketching. I said of course (I get that occasionally when I’m in London, I think it must be the way I hold my sketchbook). They had a nice digital camera; I said I had tried taking photos with a film camera but just got them developed and they had turned out really bad, so I will be sticking to the sketchbook in future. I asked if they drew and they said they did but not much, and would like to do more, so I gave them the information about Urban Sketchers London, and said they should join them on their regular sketchwalks. If you are interested, check out their calendar for the rest of 2024 at the USk London website. When I was done with my sketch, it was time to head home.

But I have a couple of other sketches to show from the area. On a different day, we all came back down to Hampstead to look around before taking a walk across Hampstead Heath. I love Hampstead Heath, it;s easy to get lost along its tree covered paths. I have a photo of my holding my son by the ponds when he was only four months old, he’s sixteen now, so we took the same one, though I wasn’t carrying him this time. As we rested on top of the Heath, looking towards Highgate Village, I did a quick small paint sketch, below. It’s hard to imagine, we lived over there before moving out to California. It was a bit of a walk, but we’d sometimes come over this way on a Sunday, enjoying the peaceful English day. We lived on Hornsey Lane, and I still love that area. We went over there on of our first days back, it had been so many years. In another universe, if we had not moved to the US, we might be over there still, my son might have grown up there. We joked about that; the truth is, working for universities which don’t pay much in England, and with the extortionate cost of living in London, there’s no way we could have afforded a bigger place in Highgate unless we got very lucky, and would probably have moved our further, or back up to Burnt Oak, or just moved to California anyway. You can’t see the multiverse. There are a lot more hills here than in Davis. We did explore Crouch End again though, I miss that neighbourhood so much, and Highate Village, and Waterlow Park. We walked down our old street and took a photo outside the house where we rented a flat, those horrible old windows were unmistakable (except they were mistakable, because we were stood outside the wrong house; our old one was a couple of doors down, so we took a photo outside that one instead).

After the walk across the Heath, the final destination beckoned: Highgate Cemetery. That is the literal final destination for many people, from your Karl Marxes, your Douglas Adamses, your Jeremy Beadles, even your Eric Hobsbawns, your Malcolm McLarens. We only walked about the East side; I’ve never been to the West side, some day I will, but I notice that David Devant (the magician after whom one of my favourite bands is named) is buried there, as is Prof. Lisa Jardine, who I actually knew from my days as a drama student at Queen Mary, and Michael Faraday, one of my favourite scientists. George Michael is in the West side too; he was a local lad from near where I grew up, and he also lived in Hampstead in his later years, and speaking of the Snappy Snaps on Hampstead High Street, that was, er, the place where he crashed his car back in 2010. Anyway, we just looked around the East side, found the big Karl Marx, found a few other names I was looking for, talked about vampires, and then went down to the village at Parliament Hill for an overpriced pub lunch. Anyway, some nice times spent in Hampstead and Highgate, still some of my favourite parts of London.