Tag: london walks

if the sun don’t come you get a tan from standing in the english rain

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name your saucesbig ben

The smart thing to do would be to check the weather forecast and then decide what to do, but of course as anyone who is familiar with London summers (or winters, autumns and springs) knows, the weather forecast cannot be relied upon anyway. We’d planned to do a walking tour around Westminster (one of the London Walks; I illustrated their book a couple of years ago, including the chapter on Secret Westminster) and wasn’t going to be put off by a few drops of rain. Indeed it looked like it would be just another breezy, grey Saturday, maybe the odd drop here and there but nothing to worry us. We met the group outside a tourist-packed Westminster station, giving me enough time to grab a ten minute sketch of Big Ben (above) before learning about Westminster’s secrets. As we stood behind Westminster Abbey looking at Oliver Cromwell across the road, the rain suddenly turned into a torrent, and pretty much stayed that way for the next few hours.

rainy walk in westminster

It was an interesting tour, to be sure, despite the massive downpour. We went down backstreets of Westminster I never even knew about, and took a stroll through the old Westminster school. Of course I attempted to sketch as we went along, which was a challenge I’ll admit. Once it was all over (a little earlier than planned, I suspect), we went to a pub in Whitehall, the Old Shades, to dry off and have something to eat.  
the shades, whitehall

Not that the rain deterred us too much. We still spent a day around central London, popping into the National Gallery, squeezing through the crowds at Hamley’s, looking through the football shirt shops (hey, it’s me).

shoe in pall mall window

And then in the evening, a night out in Camden Town with friends (one of whom, Ralph, I hadn’t seen in over twenty years). Before meeting up, I grabbed another very quick sketch standing on Camden High street. So despite all the rain, that was a fun day, and it was a fun night as well.

camden sketch

maybe it’s because i’m a londoner

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Earlier this month I officially became a published illustrator, and this week I finally received my copy of London Walks – London Stories! I was excited to receive it, and it’s quite the book; a shame I’m not in London, to walk around with it and learn a few new things. As a devout though exiled London Walks - London StoriesLondoner, and a former tour guide and London historian myself, to be asked to illustrate a book about my home city written by the guides to whom I always revered (the blue-badge London Walks folk), well an absolute honour to say the least.

One of the funny things, my name appears on the inside title page just above Rick Steves, the celebrated PBS travel guy, who wrote the foreword. Surreal! The book will be out here in the US on April 28 (I found out on amazon). The drawings have already been appearing on the London Walks leaflets you get in all the tourist places in London, in minute form, but here is how they look now:

london walks page

 I haven’t read it all yet, so I’m off to do so.

thro’ each charter’d street

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Eagle-eyed visitors to London can see my drawings on the latest info-packed leaflets for London Walks (see walks.com), which you can pick up in any tourist-area pub in central London. They’re the oldest walking tour company in London, and I’ve provided the illustrations for their forthcoming book (all will be revealed). My mum and my sister came across the leaflet (see left) while out one day by the Thames, and mailed it out to me. The drawings are pretty small, but then I do draw pretty small.

Several years ago, I used to be a tourguide myself on the streets of London, mostly as an open-top bus tourguide for the Big Bus Company, but I did a few long walking tours as well. Those buses, now that was an education in tenacity, let me tell you. When it’s pissing with rain, the microphone has stopped working so you have to shout above the London noise, when you’re stuck in thick traffic on Bayswater or scrambling round corners in Mayfair while being attacked by trees (I was actually knocked down the stairs by a tree once; I carried on speaking, “…and on your right, that’s where the Queen was born…”), being verbally abused by cab-drivers and asked strange questions by tourists (“why is it called snappy snaps?”) or being corrected on the tiniest details by smug locals (and subsequently smirked at for correcting their correction, none more smug and local than I), and making Americans laugh with a hilarious spontaneous-sounding joke I’d actually been told by another American on the previous tour, oh I enjoyed those days a lot, and I really learnt a lot. I actually loved tourguiding in London almost as much as I love drawing, so it’s a fitting pleasure that I’m illustrating this new book by these particular tourguides who, I’m told, really know their stuff.