Category: Café

Rheidol Rooms, London N1

Rheidol Rooms is a café in Islington, just North of the Regent’s Canal. I sketched it on a bright cold day.

Rheidol Rooms, 16 Rheidol Terrace, London N1 sketched 3pm 10 January 2024 in Sketchbook 14

The tree cast its image onto the café. The twigs is the shadow were so sharply defined that it was hard to distinguish the shadow from the tree.

Despite that bright blue sky, the temperature was 2 degrees C and there was a wind. I froze, and walked across to the café. Sadly, it was closed, but it looked like a really good café and I will go back. I finished the drawing at my desk.

The colours in the picture are:

  • Mars Yellow
  • Ultramarine Blue
  • Burnt Umber
  • Serpentine Genuine (green, for the window frames)
  • The grey and black is made from a mix of Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Umber

The café is at the junction of St Peter’s Street and Rheidol Terrace. It is in a 19th century row of terraced houses. “British History Online” indicates that this terrace was constructed in 1848-52.

Sketch map location of the Rheidol Rooms
Map (c) OpenStreetMap contributors

Reference: British History Online: the history of this area is here: A P Baggs, Diane K Bolton and Patricia E C Croot, ‘Islington: Growth, South-east Islington’, in A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 8, Islington and Stoke Newington Parishes, ed. T F T Baker and C R Elrington (London, 1985), pp. 20-24. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol8/pp20-24 [accessed 11 January 2024].

“….the block bounded by St. Peter’s Street, Rheidol Terrace, and Cruden Street as far as the backs of houses in Queen’s Head Lane, with provision for 14 semi-detached and 74 terraced houses, was taken by James and Thomas Ward and built up by James Ward and sublessees. Leases for nos. 7-21 St. Peter’s Street, pairs of stuccoed villas originally called Angell Terrace after the Clothworkers’ surveyor, Samuel Angell, who probably laid out the estate, were granted in 1848 and for the rest of the block from 1848 to 1852.”

Compton, St John’s Square, London EC1

Clerkenwell has many interesting corners. Here is a view across St John’s Square. I sketched it earlier today, sitting on the step of the Priory Church of the Order of St John. The restaurant is called “Compton”.

View across St John’s Square, Compton restaurant, 21 June 2023, in sketchbook 13

Here’s a map:

Thank you to the kind person from the Priory Church. They emerged from the door behind me. There I was, low down on the step, at the pen-and-ink stage, with my materials laid out neatly on the stone. They obviously had not expected anyone to be sitting on the step. I had not expected anyone to come out of the dark door. It had looked as if it had been closed shut for millennia. After a moment of surprise, politeness prevailed and we both said hello. Thereafter, I grouped my materials into a compact heap, and they came and went, tolerating me amiably, and skirting around me to operate the card key system.

This picture has just four main colours: Ultramarine blue, Brown umber, Mars yellow, and Green Serpentine Genuine. The only other colour is Fired Gold Ochre for the terracotta: the chimneys and the flowerpots. All colours are Daniel Smith watercolours.

Here is work in progress:

67 Redchurch Street E2, “Jolene” bakery

Jolene bakery is on the corner of Redchurch Street and Club Row.

Jolene, 67 Redchurch Street, from across the road. 19th August 2021. 10″ x 7″ in Sketchbook 10

This is a lively corner in a street on various edges: on the edge of the City, at the boundary between a new London and an old one, at the intersection of 21st century entrepreneurial culture and 19th century housing projects.

Redchurch Street is just North and West of Brick Lane. There are restaurants, independent clothes designers, hairdressers, and various 21st century businesses I couldn’t identify but categorised in my mind as broadly “creative”. It’s a good place to walk around, and Jolene is a great place to pause for coffee. They close at 3pm, though, so best be quick.

I arrived there at about 1pm today, and sat outside on one of their benches. Here’s the view looking up Club Row.

Looking North up Club Row, from “Jolene” Redchurch St. 9 September 2021, 2:45pm 10″ x 7″ in Sketchbook 10

Further North up Club Row, to the left of my drawing, is Arnold Circus. This is the centre point of the Boundary Estate which was the London County Council’s first social housing project, completed on 1900. I have drawn there and written about it here: