Monumental

July 13, 2023July 13, 20233 Comments

I went up The Monument. “The Monument? Which Monument? I hear you ask. Aha, The Monument. That’s all Londoners call it, and it has its own tube station called simply ‘Monument’ so that’s that (it joins up with the station called ‘Bank’ which is named after The Bank of England which we never call “The Bank”). I could write a whole book on tube station names, but it’s probably been done, I would only be using it as an excuse to draw pictures. Anyway, the full name of The Monument is actually The Monument To the Great Fire of London, and yes, it is exactly that. And I went up it, for the first time since I was in my teens. I’ve not had much of a reason to go back up there in all these years, and I do muddle up my old your guide stories about it occasionally (no it is not 365 feet high and no it does not grow a foot in leap years, that is St.Paul’s as everyone knows). It was created by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke as a huge column topped with a shiny golden ball of flames and an observation deck, so people can climb up the narrow spiral stair case (all 311 steps) and look out over the rebuilt city that Wren had created. Well I wanted to go up there and draw. The City keeps on changing, and since the last time I saw that view from that angle was in the early 1990s, it was bound to have changed a bit. The first time I went up I was about 15 or 16, and I remember getting to the top, and finding myself still looking up at buildings, while also being at the top of a very narrow stone column with just some bars stopping me from plummeting. They do say that if The Monument ever fell on its side (presumably at the exactly correct angle) it would hit the spot where the Great Fire began, in Pudding Lane. Since it had never happened, there was no chance of it toppling over, but as I reached the very tight confines of the top, my knees went all “Ossie Ardiles 1981”, and I nearly bottled it. I forced myself to the top platform, and hugged the wall with my back, edging slowly around. There was a German couple up there taking loads of photos oblivious to the height, and I thought, well Pete you better get to work on this sketch. So I whipped out my Fabriano sketchbook and my HB pencil and drew the view as well as I could. The idea was that I’d add in the pen up there, and maybe colour it in later.

Another man joined us on the platform and he like me was just edging around the column slowly in a state of terror. “Me too, mate” I said reassuringly. Despite the very sturdy looking barriers, I was convinced that I would drop my pen, and it would plummet down to the streets below, probably taking out someone’s eye and impaling them in the neck, and I would have to get a different pen. So as far as I got with the penwork was drawing Tower Bridge and a couple of other details. It started getting windy, and hello, that was it for me mate. I said Auf Wiedersehen to my brave German friends still taking photos (actually they had left long before so I was basically saying goodbye in German to a pair of American tourists) and went back down that long spiral staircase, hoping that nobody passed me coming back up.

When I reached the bottom, to my surprise they gave me a certificate that certified that I had climbed all 311 steps of The Monument. That was nice. I then went to buy some new pants. Only joking. It did remind me though of that first time I climbed up here (no certificate in those days, at least not for me) and I said something about Wren being “a nutter” to the attendant, who grumbled a possible agreement, and I had this idea about doing a project where I drew and wrote about all of Wren’s buildings in the city, and it was not until the 2010s that I did something along those lines, when I organized two big Wren-themed sketchcrawls, the first one in 2014 starting at The Monument and ending at St.Paul’s, and the second one in 2016 doing the reverse, culminating in a big group photo outside The Monument after we as a group had drawn every single Wren building in the City, all in one day, an achievement so big I’ve never got around to organizing another London sketchcrawl. Read about that sketchcrawl here. I’m still into Wren though, and I’m glad I went up The Monument. I decided to finish the inking of that drawing over the top of the pencil sketch, using what photos I dared to take as reference, and that’s the complicated panorama sketch at the top of the post. I’m very pleased with that one, click on it for a closer view.

tale of two towers

August 4, 20133 Comments

More form the first Saturday back in London… We all took the tube down from Burnt Oak (or rather, the Northern Line rail replacement bus, which for some unspecified reason took us to Finchley Road on the Jubilee Line – it appeared that the driver got rather lost) and went down to London Bridge, to visit the great Borough Market. My main reason was to get one of those really yummy grilled-chicken sandwiches that I had last year. I had been drooling over those for the past twelve months. After we sat and ate them in the gardens of Southwark Cathedral and listened to a little choir singing about how the tory government are destroying the NHS (I joined in the song, of course), we walked down towards Tower Bridge. There was a little event going on in the gardens beside City Hall, so I got a beer and we all sat down in the shade, where I quickly sketched Tower Bridge. My five-year-old son joined me for some father-son urban sketching, and he did his own version! He hasn’t done such observational sketching before so I was well impressed. He was very specific about getting the City of London flag right, that’s my boy.

I love being by the Thames. I have said it many times before, but I’m happiest by the river.

who ate all the pies?

March 2, 2011March 3, 20114 Comments

Even though I was utterly frozen on this pre-Christmas Thames-side sketching day, I had promised my son I’d draw him the bridge that goes up and down, and goddammit I was gonna draw it. Tower Bridge, as all Americans know, was built so that their taxis from Heathrow Airport could cross the river on the way to their hotels in South Kensington. On this day, there was lots of snow everywhere (it wasn’t that I didn’t fancy colouring in the grass, it really was that white). My poor micron pen by that point was ready to retire for the day, and was not cooperating in the chilly air.

The best way to warm up after a load of winter urban sketching is to go into a pub that does big hot chicken and mushroom pies. Oh yeah! And a nice beer from Yorkshire, a ‘Cropton Yorkshire Warrior’. The beer wasn’t warm, by the way. I’m always asked whether I like warm beer, being a Brit, but it’s a misconception. Lots of our beers and ales are indeed best served at room temperature, but people forget, it’s bloody cold in Britain, and we can’t afford heating any more, our rooms are freezing. The pie however was burn-yer-gob-off hot, and so British you could almost hear it humming Land of Hope and Glory.

the pool of london

February 25, 20118 Comments

This is almost it for London sketches, I promise you. But not quite yet. These were sketched down at the Pool of London – that stretch of the Thames after London Bridge, the true ancient heart of London the river city. It was an absolutely freezing cold day, bitter and icy, with snow still blasted to surfaces even here in central London, days after the massive blizzard. The scene above is of HMS Belfast, the battleship-turned-tourist spot permanently moored in the Pool of London, with the ancient Tower of London to the left and the less ancient Tower Bridge to the right. The Tower of London was built by William the Conqueror in the late eleventh century as a symbol of the Normans’ military control of the capital, while Tower Bridge was built at the end of the nineteenth century because people needed to get from one side of the Thames to the other.

I found this great spot to sketch all three, on a little covered outcrop overlooking the Thames, with benches and shelter from the wind. I sat down to sketch, got my moleskine and pens out, started to sketch and then within three minutes a couple of men from India came up and asked me not to sit there. They would be filming there, and needed me to move. I saw that there were some other people there with them, and one had a camera (not a film or TV camera, but just a fancy hand-held). “How long will you be?” I asked. I didn’t want to lose my opportunity to sketch this scene. They both answered at the same time, one said “ten minutes”, one said “half an hour to an hour”.

“Which is it?” I replied. “Half an hour at least,” they said. I told them I wanted to sketch here, it’s a public place.

“You can come back another time, the ship’s not going anywhere,” one said back to me.

“But I am,” I said. “Do you have a permit to film here?”

I know that you need a permit if you’re out filming and require the public to not go into public places. Again they both answered at the same time: one said “yes, the other said “no”. I asked to see it. No response. I knew they didn’t have one.

“Look,” I conceded, “I’ll give you fifteen minutes, and then I’m coming back and I will sketch here.” Thankfully they agreed; it was either that or call a policeman to sort out who has what rights to be where. I went off and did a quick ten-minute sketch of the Gherkin (see right), then went and warmed my hands up in a bookstore, before resuming my spot to sketch HMS Belfast. They were filming some romantic kissing scene, but they didn’t object when I came back for my turn. While I sketched, several people came along and stood in the way to take photos and look at the view, and I didn’t mind because they had every right to. It is an amazing view.

And this I sketched shortly before then, at London Bridge. This looks towards the heart of the City of London – you can see Tower 42 and the golden-topped column of the Monument there. That column, built by Christopher Wren to commemorate the Great Fire of 1666, would, if it fell over, reach the exact spot in Pudding Lane where the fire began. Presumably Wren kept that fact to himself, lest gangs of curious seventeenth-century scallywags attempt to push it over to find out. There has been a bridge on this spot called London Bridge since the time of the Romans, and yes, previous incarnations did sometimes fall down (or burn down, usually). This particular London Bridge dates back to the 1970s, when the previous one (which was not falling down, but sinking) was sold to a man in Arizona who needed it to sell postcards.

I however was utterly freezing. After these sketches I went and had a nice hot chicken pie.

oh, the weather outside is frightful

December 22, 20105 Comments

So… as you may have gathered from my non-posts this past week, I am away from rain-sodden California to lovely London, where I’ve had a week without any rain whatsoever.

Oh, but we’ve been having the worst snowy winter weather I’ve ever seen here. Many days after a sudden blizzard, the snow is still here there and everywhere, tough it hasn’t stopped me from getting out there with sketchbook. Yes, fingers freezing off and pens giving up the ghost doesn’t get in the way of this urban sketcher. Not two months ago I was sketching in hundred degree weather heat. Thing is, I grew up with snow lasting only a day or two before sodding off, and always tell people about our comparatively mild winters, but now it seems the snow comes earlier and stays longer, and the disruption is magnified. Naturally, Britain fails to cope, as the absolute madness of Heathrow attests. I’m glad I came a few days earlier than I would have. I just hope we can get back…

These are a couple of photos of what I have been out sketching though; the top one being the street where I grew up, about an hour after the biggest blizzzard I can remember here. I’m sure people thought I was a nutter sitting out there freezing, well they’re right, but urban sketchers are tough beasts. My fingers took a battering in the second one too, sat down by the River Thames, looking out at HMS Belfast and Tower Bridge. My toes were frozen too. I warmed up with a nice chicken and mushroom pie. That’s one thing Britain can always get right!

But boy, is it cold…