Category: Pen and ink

Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London E1 – September 2026

View of the Wapping Power Station from outside (January 2023)

Here is the London Hydraulic Power Station in Wapping, now known as 25 Wapping Wall. In September 2026 here was an art installation there. The alert location manager spotted my post from January 2023 and got in touch. Would I like to visit? Yes I would!

Lucy from Location Works kindly made me welcome and gave me a tour. We had fun tracing the pipes, and finding out how the water flowed.

Then I did some sketching. Here is the Accumulator Tower.

Accumulator tower, 25 Wapping Wall, 15th September 2026 in Sketchbook 17

Here is an overall view of the power station.

London Hydraulic Power – dip pen and drawing ink – 15th September 2026 – 10″ x 14″ on Somerset Smooth paper

On the right is the accumulator tower. The left and centre buildings housed the machinery which pumped the water. On the far left, at the top, are water tanks. I later found out that there are also water tanks underground, underneath where the people are standing on the left.

Cover leading to the London Hydraulic Power pipes. This one is at 25 Wapping Wall.

Hydraulic power was a way to transmit power from one place to another. These days we use electrical cables. But in the nineteenth century they hadn’t yet discovered how to generate and transmit electricity in industrial quantities. If you had a lock gate to open, or a theatre curtain to raise, or a printing press to operate, you had to do it either manually or with steam power.

You probably didn’t want to install a noisy dirty steam engine right next to your lock gate, theatre or printing press. Since you only wanted the power occasionally, it didn’t make sense to go to the trouble of building your own steam engine. So, what could you do? Answer: put a really big steam engine somewhere else, and transmit the power, using water. The power station at Wapping housed one of those really big steam engines. The steam engine pumped water at high pressure into cast-iron pipes. At the other end of the cast-iron pipe, the lock keeper opened a tap, releasing this high pressure water, which pushed the lock gates open. Or it raised theatre curtains, or operated printing presses and cranes, raised lifts. Amazing. 1

The water was in underground cast-iron pipes, 2 to 10 inches in diameter. The water was at around 800 psi or 55 bar, which is a very high pressure2. Just to give you an idea, normal water pressure in your kitchen taps in the UK is less than 1 bar3.

To maintain this high pressure despite variable demand, the steam engines pumped the water into the accumulator tower, where it raised a heavy weight. The accumulator tower was a sort of “battery”, storing power until it was needed.

I was thrilled to be able to discover the inside of this building which I had previously sketched from the outside. There is still some of the original machinery in there. Here are some snapshots. Photographs cannot convey the grandeur of the space and the quiet dignity of the machines.

I was very taken by the textures of the surfaces.

The building is now owned by the Glass Castle Foundation, a registered charity.4 They plan to use the building to host arts events:

…new owners Glass Castle Foundation have ambitious plans to turn this iconic building into a new cultural powerhouse for London. A thoughtful renovation programme from 2026 onwards will transform it into a stunning performance space and gallery for the arts, while carefully preserving its priceless industrial heritage and architecture…

https://25wappingwall.com/

The location is managed by Location Works. Many thanks to Lucy of Location Works for offering me this chance to see inside the power station.

Sketching in pen and ink.
Sketching the Accumulator Tower
“London Hydraulic Power Company 1890”
Colours of the brickwork
Sketchbook 17 page spread

I’ve also sketched another former hydraulic power station, in Limehouse:

Limehouse Accumulator Tower, E14

This is the Limehouse Accumulator Tower, seen from Mill Place, London E14. In the 19th century, this building provided hydraulic power to machinery in the Limehouse docks. Hydraulic power is…

Keep reading

See also my earlier post on London Hydraulic Power:

Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London E1

  1. There’s an explanation of hydraulic power on the Subterranea Britannica website https://www.subbrit.org.uk/features/hydraulic-power-in-london/
    Hydraulic Power in London, written by Andy Emmerson ↩︎
  2. Technical details from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Hydraulic_Power_Company ↩︎
  3. “psi” (pounds per square inch) and “bar” are measures of water pressure. Ofwat says that water companies must maintain “water of seven metres static head” in the connecting pipe to your house. This is about 10 pounds per square inch, or 0.7 bar. This is a measure of the force with which the water comes out of the tap when you turn it on.
    ↩︎
  4. The Glass Castle Foundation, Registered Charity Number 1212538, has three trustees, according to the Charity Commission website: Suneil Setiya, Neil Cosgrove and Greg Skinner. Mr Setiya and Mr Skinner are among the founders of Quadrature Capital, https://www.quadrature.ai/, an electronic trading company.
    ↩︎

Luca, 88 St John Street, EC1M

I was commissioned to make a picture of Luca, the Michelin-starred restaurant on St John Street near Smithfield, London. My client kindly gave me permission to show the picture here.

Luca, 88 St John Street, sketched May 2026, 12″ x 9″

As you can see from the sharp shadows, this was a bright spring morning. The challenge of this commission was to find a place to stand where I could see the front of the restaurant, without being in anyone’s way. That blossoming tree obscured the entire frontage from some angles. But I found a good place to stand in a door way and it didn’t rain.

I generally do a preliminary sketch for a complicated scene such as this, to work out the proportions, the perspective and the light and dark.

Luca: Preliminary sketch

Here there were two perspectives: the perspective up the street, which I marked in yellow, and the perspective perpendicular to the street, which I marked in red. As I worked this out, it gradually became obvious that the building next to Luca, number 86 on the right of my drawing, was not in line with the Luca frontage, but at a slight angle. Also the windows on Luca are not all the same. The ones on the left are wider and have more window bars. It is details such as these which conjure the character of a place, I think, and so I try to get them into the drawing.

People were going to and fro the entire time. It’s an active place. And the chimneys are marvellous.

The marvellous chimneyscape above Luca
A “picture within a picture” – people in front of the restaurant.

Here’s what the picture looked like before the colour went on, and a snapshot of work in progress.

Here, I am drawing on an Arches Aquarelle “block” of paper, which is a rigid surface. The paper is glued almost all the way round, so it doesn’t buckle. The yellow tape round the edge is masking tape. I use it to provide a neat edge to the picture, and also it’s handy to write on.

Here’s the finished picture ready to go on its journey into the world.

Th building is listed Grade II. The listing reference is 1208756 and the entry is on this link.

The listing gives the date as 1821:

“1821 (metal plaque at first floor level, reads ‘P [Parish of] SS [St Sepulchre] Mdx [Middlesex] 1821’). Yellow brick set in Flemish bond, stucco, roof of Welsh slate. Four storeys over basement, three windows each. Ground floor has elliptical-arched entrance to right to Hat and Mitre Court, the rest a shop front probably of mid-C19 origin”

Historic England listing page

Postcards from Switzerland Aug/Sept 2026

Postcards, August and September 2026

Here is the view from the mountain Le Cochet, 1,484metres high. I paused on the way down to sketch the view of the distant Alps.

Lac Neuchatel (on the left behind the trees), and the Alps, seen from the slopes of Le Cochet
31 August 2026 (A5 card, Arches Aquarelle)
Location of the sketch. I was looking south-east. I saw the Alps, 50 km away.
(Map link: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/46.351/7.430)

Work in progress:

View of the Alps

Nearby L’Auberson, where the cheese shop is, has a lovely plain church.

Temple de l’Auberson, 1 Sept 2026

Here is a photo of the cheese:

Gruyère from L’Auberson – more mature at the top (36 months), less mature at the bottom.

And here are some quick sketches of houses and roofs.

Sketches on 6″ x 4″ postcards, pen and ink
Sketches done on location, from life….

Sketching in Shetland 2026 (Part 1)

Oh how wonderful to be on the clifftop sketching the changing sky!

13th June 2026, Littlure

That sky contained rain. It came down and made a contribution to my picture.

13th June 2026, Littlure, rain on the page.

I made a lot of sketches of rocks. Here are eight sketchbook pages in a slideshow. (It might not play on a mobile device.)

The rocks on the West side of Shetland have angles and points. I particularly like the purity of shape of these rocks: the Skerries of Easter Pail. They are almost exact equilateral triangles.

Skerries of Easter Paill: Latitude 60.21449 Longitude 1.64251 OS reference HU 19912 47846

Here are more rocks, all showing the distinctive angle, about 60 degrees.

On this visit, I tried a new medium: dip pen and ink.

The ink is Rohrer & Klinger “Auszeihtusche Schwarz”

The ink is Rohrer & Klinger “Auszeihtusche Schwarz” which means (I think) “drawing ink, black”. German speakers out there, please offer a better translation? It is highly pigmented, waterproof, permanent, shellac based, and for dip pens only. In the picture above I used it with an amazing bamboo pen supplied by L Cornelissen & Son. Great fun. The picture above is large by my usual standards. The ink took a surprisingly long time to dry, then rain started and I rushed back, trying to shield the picture under its cardboard drawing board. I had more than one such sheet and they flapped like flags. Needless to say the highly pigmented ink got everywhere: on my raincoat, on my hat (how???).

Here’s the bamboo pen under calmer conditions. As you see I have now learned to wrap the bottle in a cloth to catch drips, and to label it clearly, so it doesn’t get confused with fountain pen ink which is in a similar bottle.

This was a warm day after a refreshing dip in the sea. I drew some pictures of the rocks. I used sea water to dilute the ink. This produced some interesting effects.

You see how the shellac-based ink interacted with the sea water to make little dots and swirls, a pleasing effect.

Here are some more pictures done in this ink, undiluted, and diluted with fresh water.

This ink is waterproof, but only *after* it has dried. This is sometimes a challenge in the Shetland climate. Here are some rock studies, with contributions from the rain falling on wet ink.

I tried to protect the drawings by turning the sketchbook into a sort of tent.

I enjoyed this new medium and the high-contrast effects I could obtain.

Rocks, diluted and undiluted drawing ink.

In the next post, I will show sketches of Burrastow House, on the West side, near Walls.

The Royal Oak, Columbia Road, London E2

Columbia Road flower market is famous. It takes place on Sundays from 8am to 2pm “whatever the weather”. This magnificent pub, The Royal Oak, is about half way along the road.

The Royal Oak, Columbia Road, sketched 22 January 2026, 2pm

Columbia Road has its own website. It says

“We are one of the few streets in the country composed of sixty independent shops. Small art galleries sit next to cup cake shops, vintage clothes stores, English and Italian delis, garden and antique shops. There is also a wealth of great pubs, cafes and restaurants.”

This is true, although you need to know that many of these shops are open only Friday-Sunday. I was there on a rainy Thursday. This was probably just as well, because it meant I had a good view of the pub from the doorway of the shop opposite.

Sketching “The Royal Oak” from outside “Bob and Blossom” on Columbia Road

It was the nicest-smelling location for sketching. There was a coffee shop opposite distributing coffee-and-croissant aromas into the damp air, and somewhere nearby must have been selling soap, because there were wafts of tangerine, cedar, and lavender, smelling clean and unusual.

The pub is Grade II listed, listing reference 1426765. The present building is from 1923, built to the designs of Arthur Edward Sewell, for Trumans Brewery. The listing notes “Trumans distinctive green mottled tiling” which you can see in my sketch. According to the listing, there was a previous pub here, of the same name, from before 1842. The listing also maintains that this is an “early pub” with a licence to open from 9am on Sundays to serve the market-goers. This doesn’t seem to be the case any more, according to the pub website. But if you know different, or if you are the pub, please correct me!

It is now a Youngs pub, open every day from 12 noon.

The Royal Oak, sketchbook spread, Sketchbook 16
What it looked like before the colour went on

National Theatre and 76 South Bank

On the 2nd January I joined a group of other artists sketching on London’s South Bank. This was an event organised by Jackson’s Art Supplies of Dalston.

The first picture I attempted was of the National Theatre.

Sketching the National Theatre – 2nd January 2026

It was extremely cold and there was an unforgiving wind.

I managed to finish the pen-and-ink but at this point I abandoned the idea of putting the watercolour on the picture, and hurried into the National Theatre to thaw out. The staff there patiently inspected my bag of art equipment. In the café I found a group of other artists from the event, drinking coffee, testing the operation of their fingers and talking about art materials.

Coffee and company warmed me up. I decided to try simpler drawings using big crayons that I could wield in gloves. Here’s a flick through the sketchbook:

South Bank sketchbook flick-through

The black marks are made with a Derwent “inktense” stick. These sticks make charcoal-like marks, which you can then darken or spread out with water.

The National Theatre – inktense stick on Arches cold-pressed paper

Here’s my last picture of the day. I was determined to use the watercolours, and found a spot where the wind was attenuated by a concrete wall.

At 3pm we all congregated and shared our pictures. I was really impressed at how many of us had persisted, in the cold, right to the end of the event, and at the wonderful work everyone had done. I mean, doing anything at that temperature was an achievement, I thought. You can see a picture of the assembled participants in the Jackson’s newsletter on this link.

Later, at home in the warm, I added the watercolour to my initial sketch of the National Theatre.

National Theatre and 76 South Bank – 2nd January 2026 in sketchbook 16

It was an inspiring day out. Thank you to the Jackson’s team for the initiative and the organisation. And thanks to the wonderful National Theatre for the warm and welcoming spaces, the café, and the toilets…..!

Trieste Travel Journal – September 2025

I was gifted a sketchbook from L Cornelissen of London, a marvellous thing, beautifully bound.

Sketchbook from L Cornelissen, 9.5 inches by 7.5 inches, thick cartridge paper

It seemed perfect for taking on a visit to Trieste, Italy.

I used it for notes, sketches, and as a sort of scrapbook. After the trip I added photos. Here are some of the pages.

Here is a video of the journal (silent, about 90 seconds).

The black and white photos are analogue, from a film camera. The camera is an Olympus XA2 point-and-shoot from the 1980s, and the film was Kentmere 400 pan, developed and printed by Analogue Wonderland.

38 Charterhouse Street, London EC1

My idea that day was to sketch some interesting corner pubs in Bloomsbury.

By the time I had emerged from my flat and was on the street, the bright autumn day had turned stormy. After a few paces, the rain started falling. Everyone dashed for cover. I sheltered in a doorway, together with another woman, two strangers in a refuge, grinning and rolling our eyes. “Well, it is September”. At a pause in the deluge, we both emerged and went our separate ways. I went doggedly towards the West, but no, the rain returned, seemingly even more torrential. I dashed from doorway to doorway, like a fugitive in a spy novel, finding cover where I could. Then I spotted the generous overhang of Smithfield Market and rushed underneath, the rain spattering on the glass above. There was no sign of the deluge ceasing, so I considered, as you do in these strange interim conditions: to go on? to go back? Or to stay where you are?

Why not do the drawing right here? Over the other side of the road is a building occupying an acute angle between roads. It wasn’t in my plan, but by this time I had abandoned my plan. So here is 38 Charterhouse Street, sketched from the shelter of the Smithfield Meat Market canopy.

38 Charterhouse Street, EC1M 6JH sketched 4th September 2025 in Sketchbook 16

I sketched it in pen on location. Part way through the process, a group of workers started to clean the area behind me, using high-pressure water hoses. A fine mist appeared in the air, adding to the general dampness. I finished the drawing later that evening, in my warm dry room.

38 Charterhouse Street, photo
Drawing in progress on location
Detail of finished drawing
This was where I was standing to sketch, this area was cleaned with high-pressure water hoses.

Here is a map.

As you see, number 38 stands on a little triangle of land, bounded by Charterhouse Street, Carthusian Street and the tiny alley called Fox and Knot Street.

British History Online offers some history for this triangular plot. In the 1860s the City of London redeveloped the Smithfield Meat Market. At the time it had been mostly an open-air market. The City turned it into the covered market it is today. The surrounding lanes and buildings were also affected, both by the redevelopment and the increased trade.

In 1869–70, with the new market building complete, it was resolved to take the new road along the north side of the market further east into the square itself, carried out in 1873–4. The road was called Charterhouse Street, apparently at the suggestion of the Charterhouse,
Whereas in 1860 Charterhouse Lane enjoyed a mix of businesses, in 1876 half of the sixteen surviving houses were occupied by meat and poultry traders. The same trades dominated the new buildings put up, though there were also coffee rooms to rival the two remaining pubs and a large bank at the corner with St John Street. By the time of the Second World War most of the buildings west of the Fox and Anchor at No. 115 were purpose-built cold stores. Only with the decline of Smithfield Market did the grip of the meat trades loosen. Today restaurants and bars have largely supplanted them.

British History online

The Fox and Anchor pub and the former cold stores are on the left of my drawing. I’ve drawn the marvellous frontage of the Fox and Anchor here.

British History Online describes the block on the corner, number 38:

The City of London arms on the building today.

The remnant of ground at the angle between the old and new roads was laid out for a small block of buildings and allotted the numbers 38–42 (even) Charterhouse Street, behind which a tiny street, Fox and Knot Street, was cut through in 1871. The name was taken from Fox and Knot Yard, a court obliterated by the new market.

The small triangular block west of Fox and Knot Street […] just within the City boundary, belongs to the land acquired by the Corporation of London in the 1860s for the Smithfield Market development. Set out for building in 1871–2, it remained empty until 1875–6. At the apex a warehouse (No. 38), was then built for Myer and Nathan Salaman, ostrich-feather merchants, to designs by Benjamin Tabberer. […] It is four storeys high, of red brick with regular fenestration; all the ornamentation is concentrated on the narrow corner. For many years there were coffee-rooms here.

So, in 1875 it was an ostrich-feather warehouse, which must have been a great place to visit. The next mention of the building is on the website of Herbert, a present-day supplier of technology to retail businesses. They have a section of their website devoted to their long history. In the early twentieth century they were supplying weighing machines and balances from their offices in West Smithfield and a factory in Edmonton.

Advertisement from the Herbert History site, showing Smithfield Market.

In 1937 they moved into 38 Charterhouse Street which became a showroom.

The Herbert and Son showroom, circa 1940s.

Herbert and Son moved out in 1956 and consolidated their operations into their Edmonton site. Since then, the building has been a coffee house, and, more recently, various bars. It is now the “Smithfield Tap”.

I wonder what will happen to it next?

Sketchbook 16

References

British History Online reference: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol46/pp265-279
Charterhouse Square area: Charterhouse Street and other streets’, in Survey of London: Volume 46, South and East Clerkenwell, ed. Philip Temple (London, 2008), British History Online https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol46/pp265-279 [accessed 6 September 2025].

Herbert history reference: http://www.herberthistory.co.uk/cgi-bin/sitewise.pl?act=det&pt=&p=279&id=herbhis

Putting on the colour at my desk.

Colours, all Daniel Smith unless otherwise stated:

  • Fired Gold Ochre (bricks)
  • Ultramarine Blue Finest (Schmincke Horadam) + Burnt Umber = grey/black
  • Phthalo Blue Turquoise (reflections, water)
  • Mars Yellow (bricks)
  • Serpentine Genuine (Green tiles)
  • Buff Titanium (cream-coloured stonework)
  • Transparent Pyrrol Orange (highlights of red on the bollards)

Walking around Glasgow

On the way to and from Sketch and Sail last week, my journey took me through Glasgow. I spent a few hours walking around that city, sketchbook in hand.

Here is West George Street, looking east, downhill towards St Georges Tron Church.

This was a Sunday. Glasgow was quiet. Until there was the sound of flutes, or perhaps more accurately fifes. And then a procession. I tried to sketch the people as they walked by.

Who were they? What was it about? I had sort of guessed, before I asked the police officer. “The Grand Orange Lodge” he told me. So this was an Orange March, a procession by Protestant fraternal societies. I had heard of them in the news as taking place in Northern Ireland, but I had not heard of them in Glasgow, or anywhere else. They arouse contention in some contexts. This procession seemed low-key and passed through peacefully, gone almost before I had thought through what I was looking at.

I walked on, in the opposite direction, towards the West End of Glasgow.

In Glasgow there are magnificent Victorian buildings, some of them strangely derelict and empty. Here is the roofscape of the former buildings of Glasgow City Council: huge empty buildings around a vast courtyard.

Here is an eight storey building on Hope Street: “The Lion Chambers”, perhaps a former legal practice.

One of the joys of walking in cities is that you pass through invisible membranes, barely detectable boundaries between the derelict areas and the areas that have been reinvigorated, or between the commercial areas and the residential districts. As I walked West I saw a tower on the horizon, with a parapet.

This looked like the type of tower I have sketched in London at St Thomas’ hospital.

But on closer inspection it turned out to be a church. Or rather, it had been a church. Now it is a residential tower called “Trinity”, looking very smart.

I was sketching between rainstorms. By this time I was high up overlooking the city.

A bit further on there is the botanic gardens. The rain stopped and suddenly the place looked like a sunlit utopia, with people of all kinds and all ages out sitting on benches and chatting to each other amongst flowers and cultivated trees. Further on still, I came to a river.

It was time to turn around and head back East. I became comprehensively lost amongst the pedestrian underpasses knotted around the M8 motorway. But an elderly gentleman put me right, turning around and walking with me to the summit of a bridge, from which vantage point he could indicate the correct route with his walking stick.

It’s a city of many cities, is Glasgow. Wealth and dereliction, renovation and decay. There is a sense of waves of renewal, ups and downs. Or perhaps that was just because I was returning from a sea trip, and the pavement was not yet entirely steady under my feet.

Vauxhall Tea House Theatre, SE11

The Vauxhall Tea House Theatre is one on my favourite places. It is a “tea house by day, theatre by night”. Here is a sketch of the outside:

Vauxhall Tea House Theatre, 12″ x 9″ pen and wash original. [sold]

Here is a sketch of the interior by day:

Vauxhall Tea House Theatre, interior with cat. 12″ x 9″ pen and wash original. [Sold]

There are winged chairs you can sink into, wooden tables you can work at, magazines and newspapers you can read. There is tea. There is cake. There is at least one cat.

It’s a short walk from Vauxhall station. Definitely worth a visit.

Above is from their Summer 2024 programme.

From the Tea House Theatre website:

“We are trying to be different. We will not hurry you. If you visit us on your lunch break, then have one, you will be more productive in the afternoon. If you want to have a meeting, we will not disturb you. If you are ‘working from home’, we have wifi. If you have children, we have highchairs, a chest of toys, and milkshakes. We always have the daily papers, so please, relax, and share in what we are trying to create, take a load off, and have a cuppa.”

Magnificent!