Tag: piccadilly

afternoon tea at fortnum’s

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Fortnum and Mason, London

One afternoon while in London I took my Mum for tea at Fortnum and Mason, on Piccadilly. It was an early treat for her birthday, something festive to do before Christmas. I took her there once before years ago (I think the prices were about half what they are now) and have wanted to take her again for ages. It’s up in the Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon, though to get up there you need to brave the packed store full of Christmas shoppers and squeeze into the tiny elevator. It’s lovely though, and I still put Fortnum’s among my favourite London shops. During the pandemic for Mother’s Day I ordered a hamper for my mum and another one for my mother-in-law which had to be shipped over to California, they do really nice tea and cake hampers. Piccadilly at this time of year, the start of December, is even more crowded than usual, but I don’t mind. It means London’s doing alright. We walked about a bit looking at expensive cars in the Lotus showroom (they had Ayrton Senna’s old F1 car), expensive jewellery at Bentley and Skinner, and expensive glassware at the Lalique store in Burlington Arcade. I took the opportunity to draw Fortnum and Mason from across the street, as during Christmas time the whole store is made up to resemble an advent calendar. As you may know, I have a long history of making advent calendars so the idea of turning an entire building into one makes me happy. A lot of people were stopping to wait for the little statues of Mr. Fortnum and Mr. Mason to come out from the ornamental clock and tell us what time it is. Fortnum and Mason dates back centuries, 1707 in fact, the time of Queen Anne, Fortnum being one of the Queen’s footmen. I sketched for a while as my Mum looked around some shops, and by the time I was about done there was a woman who had set up a little camera on a tripod to film herself talking about the Bible and singing psalms, fair enough but when they get a microphone out and start going on about sinners that’s enough for me. Anyway it was time for our tea. We each got the regular Afternoon Tea with scones, sandwiches, cakes and tea, as much as we could eat and drink, and we ended up taking many of our cakes home with us and eating them over the next couple of days, they were quite rich and filling. We started off with a drink called a ‘turtle dove’, a kind of cocktail that was so good, a nice way to kick off Christmas. For tea I had the Afternoon Blend, Mum had the Queen Anne. I think, I can’t remember now. I think I had a couple of different types actually. I had to draw the teapot and cap along with a cake that looked like a present. When we were done I spent more money downstairs picking up a few things here and there to bring home for family, but I could have got so much nice stuff. My Mum bought a nice Fortnum’s ornament for my wife (when they wrapped it, it was like that scene in Love Actually with Rowan Atkinson and Alan Rickman), and I bought chocolates and tea and fancy greeting cards. I bought a lot of fancy greeting cards on this trip, Britain does the best ones, by far. So that was our tea at Fortnum’s, a nice treat and a very festive thing to do before Christmas.

tea at Fortnums

piccadilly to tower hill

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Piccadilly, London

I didn’t do a lot of London sketching on the first few days of our trip, just what I could get in quick moments. The one above was drawn while waiting for my wife, I was outside Waterstones in Piccadilly (in the building which used to be Simpson, Piccadilly, the old department store which was the inspiration for the TV show Are You Being Served). Looking towards Piccadilly Circus. It was the sky that interested me.

Beatles blue plaque savile row

We walked into Mayfair and up towards Savile Row. It’s incredible, I’ve never actually been up Savile Row. I explored London for years but for some reason Mayfair a lot less so, though I would give open-top bus tours round a lot of the fancy squares and high-end streets, twenty-odd years ago. I had it in my head that Savile Row was further up, on the other side of Oxford Street somewhere, but of course it’s just a block off Regent Street. I do love that even in London I can be surprised and find places I’d not really been to before. The only place on Savile Row I was interested in seeing of course was #3, now an Abercrombie and Fitch, but that was once the HQ of the Beatles’ Apple Corps, and where they played that concert on the roof in January 1969. Watch ‘Get Back’, it’s my favourite thing ever (right up there with Star Wars and The Dark Crystal). There’s a blue plaque to commemorate the historic event, and so I put that in my sketchbook.

St Vedast Alias Foster, London

We were on our way to take a London Walk, over by St.Paul’s. It was the walk called “Old London”, and was a two-hour-plus stroll through ancient streets in the City, ending up at Tower Hill. It was a hot day, but our guide was excellent and she took us along streets I hadn’t explored in years, or didn’t even know about (and I have given walking tours in this part of London myself years ago). See https://www.walks.com/ for details on all their walks, given by accredited blue-badge guides, they are great and know a lot more than me. I was remembering some of the old stuff I used to know, but was fascinated by the stories. I did one sketch of St. Vedast-Alias-Foster, one of the many Christopher Wren churches, while we waited.

Tower Hill London

When it was over my wife got the tube back home while I stayed out a bit longer to do some sketching before dinner. I decided to draw the Tower, with that big sundial thing in the foreground. I was pretty tired though, my heart wasn’t really in it, so I left it as it was and got on the District Line. We were off to Scotland next day.

and don’t dilly-dally on the way

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st james church, piccadillypiccadilly postbox

Londonistas, fear not. I still haven’t finished posting all of my London sketches from December. There are still more to come. I’ve been spreading them out over a period of a couple of months to keep you coming back. Or rather, because I’ve just not gotten around to scanning and cropping and blah blah. Still, it mixes it up a bit – San Francisco here, Islington there, Sacramento here, little bit of Davis. This is Piccadilly, in central London. It’s a thoroughfare named after those ruff collars that people used to wear years ago (think Shakespeare, Raleigh, Blackadder…) and full of fine shops and elegances. St. James’s church (above left) is a great old Wren church, free of stained glass (as was the fashion in Protestant England) and a building I’ve wanted to sketch for quite a while. Light was fading though (the sun goes down at about midday in England in December) so I had to be quick. A few people asked if I sold my sketches while I was sat there. One even asked me in Italian. Another said he’d give me a fiver for it. Sorry, I said, this is part of my sketchbook and I don’t cut out pages. A tenner then, he said. Hmmm, five hundred quid, I said. Bargaining ended there, and I got back to sketching.

I sketched a post box on St. James Street. It has two slots for letters, which is handy if you’re in a hurry. It reminded me of that line in Little Britain, “if you put a second class stamp on a letter in Britain, it’s guaranteed to arrive somewhere at some point in the future, maybe.” Ah, Britain. When I used to be a tourguide I would tell my American tourists that the “ER” meant ‘Emergency Room’. I also used to tell people that, where an ‘L’ plate on a car means ‘Learner’, the ‘GB’ sticker means ‘Getting Better’.   

the angel commonly called erosgielgud theatre, shaftesbury avenue

I also used to tell them that Piccadilly Circus was the Times Square of London (which is what we’re supposed to say), and that the statue of ‘Eros’ isn’t Eros at all. It’s called the Angel of Christian Charity, and was erected for the Earl of Shaftesbury. It is supposed to point up Shaftesbury Avenue, but now i fact points the other way, due to a mistake when re-erecting it. Now it’s used as the emblem of that paragon of virtue and unbiased truth, the Evening “we can’t even justify being paid for so now we’re free” Standard. It was, as always, very busy. McDonalds was jam packed; it was like Piccadilly Circus.

And there on the right, the Gielgud Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the Theatreland of Soho. I remember when this used to be the Globe Theatre, but it got changed and now we have a different theatre called the Globe (something to do with that Shakespeare guy again, they’re still going on about him). As I sketched, a group of small oiks gathered around me to watch. I sped up and moved to a different spot. I don’t trust small oiks, out in feral packs on the streets of London. I do like it round here though; a mate of mine lived about a block north of this spot years ago, up in Berwick Street, and those were great times. I can even remember some of them.