I had another sketching day out down in central London, going down to Tottenham Court Road station on a Monday morning in mid-May. This area has changed so much. This was always my go-to stop when heading down into central, most of the things I wanted to do were near this station. The Virgin Megastore, the big record store on the corner of Oxford St and Tottenham Court Road, I spent a lot of time in there throughout my teens and early twenties, now of course a distant memory. The British Museum is just a short walk from here, I would go there a lot. The Hellfire Club, later ‘Metros’, and other night-time places we’d go like the Astoria, LA2, Plastic People, Borderline, Marquee, all those were right here, all gawn now. I worked at a chocolate shop (Thorntons) just a little way down Oxford Street, back in 1996. All the music instrument shops at Denmark Street and down Charing Cross Road, some of which are gone, some still remain, all right here. Charing Cross Road itself, I loved all the bookstores down there but I loved Foyles the most. There is still a Foyles and it’s still big, but it’s not in the same place, it’s a little further down, and very clean and well organized. The Foyles I remember was massive but everything was crammed in, literally, and the upstairs was a labyrinthine jumble, and I’d go there looking through all the books on language and travel, I loved it. Now I pop into the current Foyles to see if they have any of my books (they didn’t). And then there’s the tube station, which before was a claustrophobic little station with secret passages and loads of different exits, which was always fun when saying “meet me outside the entrance to Tottenham Court Road”, a rookie mistake. Now, with the Elizabeth Line which brought so much architectural change to this corner of London, the newer version of the station is much bigger, modern, with spacious exits including a large one outside Center Point, which is where I stood to draw the sketch above. I looked north-west to the rooftops that haven’t changed at all, with the interesting blue and cloudy London sky above it. At ground level, a pub called The Flying Horse, which was called The Tottenham when I was younger, often called the only pub on Oxford Street (which is true, other pubs are just off it). There’s a shop next door called BasicMart now, which wasn’t there before and is quite handy to grab a chocolate bar and a fizzy drink when peckish, and seems to be open all hours, as I discovered when coming home late one Saturday evening (on the ‘Night Tube’! You can now get a tube in the wee hours right back up to Burnt Oak from here, a zipping 30 minute trip rather than wait for the packed, slow and usually awful Night Bus). Along those rooftops, I always liked that little golden dome. All the bits in between, all the windows and details, I was going to draw but decided not to spend the time doing so, it looked better in that unfinished state, let the mind fill in the gaps, I drew the bit I wanted to. Time to get moving. I wasn’t going far, just spending the day walking about an area I love. It was a day off, I wasn’t planning to do any remote work that evening (the time difference with California means I did a bit of evening work on this trip, a few meetings and such). So I headed down to Denmark Street, and spent a lot of time playing guitars.
Around the corner from Denmark Street is New Oxford Street (it runs up to Oxford Street and drops the ‘New’ bit when it reaches that junction with Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross Road) (we have to say the whole names of streets in London, it’s not like San Francisco where you’d just say “Market” or “Columbus”, though we do have a lot of one-name streets in London such as “Piccadilly”, “Lothbury” or “Strand” (not “The” Strand, though we are allowed to add a “The”) (imagine saying “The Piccadilly” though! You’d be laughed all the way to the M25, which by the way is just called “M25” but we say “The M25” or “That bloody M25”). The thing I wanted to drawn on New Oxford Street is James Smith & Sons, a famed and historic umbrella shop, established in 1830. It’s one of those old London gems that will hopefully always be here. I mean, it’s never going to stop raining, is it? Maybe with global warming and dryer summers, but come on this is Britain. Sure, many Londoners will always be like, I don’t need an umbrella, and that’s how I was when I lived there. Umbrellas were more trouble than they were worth, once you got on the tube or bus and folded them up, they would just be dripping everywhere, so I rarely carried one, but I must admit umbrellas are useful. Plus it’s what we British people look like in films isn’t it, an umbrella and a bowler hat. I’ve always wanted to draw the interior, after seeing a great drawing by Karen Neale in her book, London in Landscape. I love those books she produced of London sketches in two-page spreads, especially as I’ve done quite a few myself over the years, it gave me some inspiration to keep that up. Anyway, I stood across the street and leaned on one of those electric boxes you get, perfect leaning height, and drew as much as I could. I had to stop though because my X-Ray vision didn’t extend through double-decker buses. So much traffic on this stretch, so many buses stopped in front of me, I could only draw about half of this, if that, before giving up and going somewhere else. So I drew in the rest later. The people were drawn pretty early on, and that woman passing by did have a red poncho, and that person at the lights was wearing a little red scarf, so I was like right, matching those into the big red ‘umbrellas’ sign. I should have drawn a red bus in the way too.
I cut down an alley and reappeared in Charing Cross Road, opposite Foyles. I walked down to where Macari’s Musical Instruments used to be, until it closed a few years ago. I loved that shop, it’s where I bought my current acoustic guitar, back in the tail end of 1996 while I was on my break at Thorntons. I had been wanting an acoustic for years, only having my old electric, and I saw this one, a Hohner, which was not very expensive but had a lovely dark matte wood colour and a lovely dark matte wood tone, and I knew this was the one. It still is the one, I brought it out to America a couple of years after moving here, back when it was a bit easier to just bring your big guitar into the main cabin of the plane. Well Macari’s is gone. I wanted to draw the green stripy building across the street, the one above the Harmony adult store. I might have sketched it before but I don’t remember, though another artist I follow, Liam Farrell, did an amazing oil painting of it a few years back, and then another one in watercolour. I have drawn the pub opposite, on the corner of Old Compton Street (a street by the way which it is perfectly acceptable to just call “Old Compton”, I guess, without people laughing you to the M25). Last time I drew it though it was still called Molly Moggs.
Further down Charing Cross Road, towards Leicester Square tube station, are the few remaining old bookstores. I first went into Fopp, a store that sells these old things called ‘CDs’ and ‘DVDs’ which people used to use before everything became instantaneously available to us at all times with no surprises. I was amazed to see it still there, it was a thing that rose up from the days when the Virgin Megastores all fell. I also popped into the Orc’s Nest, a little games shop that has been there for many years, and with the popularity of modern board games I was glad to see doing well. I remember buying a little metal minifigure here of ‘Death’, the character form the Terry Pratchett books, back when I was about 18. They didn’t have any this time. So I walked down to see if the old bookshops were still there, and there they are, the token bookshops, probably allowed to remain in existence so Charing Cross Road, historically London’s old bookshop street, could still pretend to be so. Most of the other shops here are basically the 21st century writ large, so these old shops stand out. I didn’t go into any as I didn’t need any old books for anything, but I did remember coming here with my friend Tel (mentioned in previous posts), we were about 17 maybe, and out exploring London, going to the National Gallery and Chinatown. I was into buying second hand books then, I would read a lot, but he decided that he wanted to buy a bunch of books cheap to put on his shelf “so that girls would think he read a lot”. (I never let him forget that! But hey, when we are teenagers that’s what it’s all about, see also me playing the guitar). So he bought about 20 or 30 books, can’t have spent more than about a tenner tops, and I had to help him carry them in flimsy carrier bags all around central London. None of the books were ones he would ever actually read, mostly cheap fantasy or sci-fi, but we lugged them all back up on the Northern Line to his old bedroom. It’s funny, eventually he became a buyer and seller of books, many of them rare and valuable that he would find in old stores or in auctions or online, and I think back to that afternoon carrying around all those cheap books, that’s probably where that started. Anyway back to 2023. I decided to draw this one shop, Any Amount Of Books, while traffic slowly ambled past blocking my view. At one point, a huge white van did stop in front of the shop for an extended period, at which point I just abandoned it and went off to Covent Garden, finishing the rest of the details, the brickwork and all that hatching, while eating some dinner. I still had a fair bit of sketching left to do that day which I’ll put in another post, but this was my walk down Memory Lane (actually it’s called Old Memory Road, you’d better get it right).
petescully 