Brewhouse Yard, Clerkenwell

Looking up, I saw the clock.

I sat on a convenient step to draw it. It was really hard to get all those perspective lines in the right place. While I was struggling with them, a car pulled into the silent square. It was shiny, gold metallic, and very clean. It came to a halt, and rocked a bit on its tyres. A man got out and disappeared from my field of view. I assumed he was the director of one of the architecture practices round there. I continued adjusting my perspective lines. Then I saw the man walking about photographing the car with a big digital camera. The camera made that artificial shutter-click, lots of times. He was taking a lot of photographs of the car. He moved it and photographed it from a different angle. It was a Citroen CX GT 2400. That was written on the boot lid. He must have seen me looking at it, because he came over and asked, very politely, if his car was in the way of my drawing. I was astonished, drivers are usually uncaring about parking in your sightline. But this guy cared. So I smiled and said that no, it was fine, I was drawing the clock up there, but thank you very much for asking. So he went on clicking, and I went on shifting the lines on my drawing, and we co-existed happily in the square.

He moved the car again and I thought he’d gone. But when I packed up my stuff and was examining the house I’d been drawing, he called out to me, “Did you get it?”. He meant, did I capture the view in my drawing. I said yes, and would he like to see the picture? He would. We talked about the house. He said it’s residential. Someone lives there. The resident had just gone out, in fact.

It’s clearly the former headquarters of the Brewers Yard. The door is very splendid. The pillar on one side has hops, and on the other side, barley and hops.