This lamp burns gas from the sewers. It’s an engineering marvel from the Victorian age, together with Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, the Embankment and Tower Bridge. Amazingly, it’s still standing, and still burning sewer gas, now renamed “biogas”. The notice on the fence says:
The adjacent street light is the last remaining sewer gas destructor lamp in the City of Westminster. Installed in association with Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s revolutionary Victoria Embankment sewer which opened in 1870, this cast iron ornamental lamp standard with original lantern continues to burn residual biogas.
City of Westminster, notice in Carting Lane
Carting Lane Sewer Gas Destructor Lamp, sketched 13 Feb 2023, 2pm in Sketchbook 13.
The original purpose of the lamps was not to light the streets but to burn off sewer gas, with the aim of reducing odours, exterminating bacteria in the sewer gas and reducing the explosion risk. Some town gas is drawn in with the sewer gas to make sure the lamp stays alight and does its job. The lamp is alight night and day. This was alight at 2pm.
Carting Lane runs down from the Strand to the Thames Embankment, right next to the Savoy Hotel. I drew the picture standing above the lamp, looking down the lane towards the Thames. Here’s a map.
Here is work in progress:
The colours in the picture are:
Ultramarine Blue and Lavender for the sky,
Serpentine Genuine/Burnt Umber/Fired Gold Ochre/ Mars Yellow for the mid-tones
Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Umber mix for the blacks and greys
Transparent Pyrrol Orange for the 20mph sign on the lamppost.
My current watercolour palette. The colours I used for this picture are starred. All Daniel Smith colours.
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Here is the “Micklegate Bar”, which is one of the great gates through the old City wall into the centre of York.
Micklegate Bar, York, 7th October 2021, 3pm. 7″x10″ in Sketchbook 10
I sketched this outside a bar called “Micklegate Social”. The staff were inside, cleaning and setting up. They very kindly lent me a chair!
The city wall goes off to left and right. I put a two people in, to give you an idea of the scale. They are high up, level with the lowest windows.
“Micklegate” is the name of a street which heads North from the gate. Later on I had breakfast at “Partisan”, a café just up from Micklegate Bar. Recommended!
Quick sketch at “Partisan”, Micklegate, York, ink and coffee. 6″ x 4″ in a small sketchbook made by Heather Dewick.
Outside the wall, to the North West, is the park surrounding the York Museum. I made a picture of the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey.
St Mary’s Abbey, York. 7th October 2021 2pm. 1hr 10mins, 10″ x 7″ in Sketchbook 10
The original church on the site was founded in 1055. In 1089, William Rufus, third son of William the Conqueror, laid the foundation stone for the Norman Church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. It was an abbey for the Benedictine monastery on this site. 450 years later the monastery was closed, in 1539, under Henry VIII.
The current ruins are 750 years old. They date from a rebuilding in 1271.
Work in progress on the drawing.
Micklegate Bar, Partisan Café, and St Mary’s abbey
St Mary’s Abbey (top left)
Maps
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There’s a lot of empty space in Shetland. As I walked around, sometimes I encountered abandoned vehicles. Here is one. This was the last of a sequence of such car wrecks on a track.…
Poppies, Burrastow. 1 July 2021 on watercolour paper
These poppies were so stunning that I had to try to draw them. There and then. They are also ephemeral.
In a few days the petals had dropped making splashes of scarlet on the grass.
I drew this on special paper: handmade watercolour paper from the Vintage Paper Company. It is very heavily sized and takes the colour well. It’s also stiff, and easy to use out-doors.
The red is Transparent Pyrrol Orange waercolour from Daniel Smith.
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These black tubes seem to be indestructible. People find all sorts of uses for them: fence posts, cattle grids, boat slipways. I imagine they would make rather fine musical instruments. I have never heard of anyone using them for this.
But their primary use is to create the salmon cages that float out on the shallow seas in the area.
I saw these tubes on a walk from the Historic Site. I’ve drawn in this location before. In this sketch, you see the black tubes as the small scratchy lines in the centre distance.
Fish farm debris, 13th August 2019
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My New Year card for 2021 shows a telephone kiosk.
New Year, 2021, “Connection”, woodcut 6″ x4″, on Japanese Kozo paper
I am of a generation for whom the telephone kiosk was, at one time in my life, an important feature of communications. You looked for them. You found them. They were either working or not. The inside smelt of old metal, coinage, leaves and urine. The phone was heavy and cold. The thick cord was twisted. You had to have the right coins. Sometimes coins jammed in the slot, or went straight through the mechanism without registering. So if you were experienced, and organised, you had a whole series of coins of different denominations ready to put in, in case the first one didn’t work. If your call was important, or if you needed to write something down, it was helpful to have a friend with you in the telephone kiosk, standing by with the coins, poised to enter them rapidly as the pips went. There was a risk-based calculation about what denomination of coin to enter, and in what order. You might enter small change first, while you worked out if the person you wanted was in, then drop in the big money for the important conversation, so that the pips did not cut you off at a critical point. You might enter a variety of change at the beginning in the hope that some of it would be returned if the call was shorter than you expected. But your money was not always returned.
Above all, a telephone kiosk represented hope: the hope of connection. That’s my hope for 2021.
Also in the woodcut I put some people. These might be the three wise men, looking for hope and salvation in a humble building.
I based my woodcut on phone boxes I have encountered recently. It is a K2 phone box, like the one at Lower Marsh, Waterloo. You can tell, because it has six rows of windows.
Lower Marsh, Waterloo
Lera Voe, Shetland
Royal Courts of Justice
Aldermanbury
Walberswick
Here is work in progress:
Sketch
Wood carving
Inking
Watercolour gold
Relief ink
Prints drying
Inking
The background gold colour is, amazingly, watercolour: Daniel Smith Iridescent Gold. The red is Schmincke relief printing ink. The paper came, via friends, from “Paper Nao” in Tokyo. It is kozo paper, I think K-148, and brilliant for hand-printing. It doesn’t crinkle, it takes the colour well, and it’s really strong so it doesn’t tear when you pull it off the plate.
I like phone boxes. They appear in various of my drawings, see for example, these posts:
Here are my greetings for the New Year, sent as cards. They are woodcuts, two plates. The orange/red colour was printed first. The black colour is the Schminke “Aquadruck” black relief ink diluted with extender kindly lent to me by Connie at East London Printmakers. Her extender was from the Caligo range, and was slightly…
Happy New Year! I made a woodcut. This is a greetings card, about 7″x5″. It is from two woodblocks, one orange and one blue. Here is work in progress at East London Printmakers: In the background you see the Albion press I used for printing. It is a wonderful cast-iron machine. As well as the…
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What is inktober? It’s a drawing challenge. There are prompts each day in October. The challenge I set myself is to do a drawing for each prompt, in ink, square. You can see the prompts here and on Inktober.com Why do I do it? It’s different from my “normal” work. My urban sketches and other art generally take several hours, and are from life (non-fiction). I do the inktober drawings quickly, in less than half an hour normally, and from imagination (fiction). Inktober jolts me into other worlds. It’s also a challenge, and enjoyable. I also like to see what other people draw, from the same prompt. The drawings are posted on instagram with the tag #inktober2020.
I did it last year for the first time. It surprises me that I can do it.
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Aboard a quite different vessel, the Northlink Ferry, I arrived in Aberdeen the next morning. Aberdeen was in lockdown, and I planned to spend as little time there as possible, just two hours, before my train left for the South. My idea was to sit in the sun outside the ferry terminal, eating my packed breakfast, before a gentle stroll to the railway station. Ha! I arrived in Aberdeen in the middle of a rainstorm. Roads had become rivers. On the periphery of my vision, a drain cover had lifted, and the water rose from it in a translucent pillar. I struggled towards the station through floods and wind.
…the floor was covered in a thin layer of water….
Aberdeen station was a huge glass tent, with the rain battering, and lightning visible, dimly, through the roof covering. It also resembled all the tents I have ever known in that the floor was covered in a thin layer of water. I sat down damply on a damp metal bench. All the trains were cancelled. Fortunately, I had some banana cake. I drew a picture. Then I found a helpful official and a bus.
The bus was going to Edinburgh. I drew a picture on the bus. After having been in Shetland for three weeks, I noticed that there were huge trees, everywhere. The sun came out.
On the bus: wind turbines, fields, barns, and TREES.
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This is the Lera Voe phone box, which is on the road between Burrastow and Walls.
The Lera Voe phone box
The phone box is a landmark. This year it was renovated, and fitted out as a sanctuary and small room. There is no phone in there any more, unless you bring your mobile phone with you.
Henry Anderton did the renovation. His project was partly financed by a reward he obtained for having found a message in a bottle on one of his beach-cleaning outings. You can read about it in this article from the BBC, published in February 2020.
The article says of Mr Anderton: “He has bought the phonebox, near Walls, for £1 and been supplied with the regulation red paint from BT. He said: “We’ve now launched a crowd funding operation to help out the renovations – we’ve got to find a door first.”“
Evidently he found a door, because when I visited in July the phone box was complete, bright red and in great shape. There are shelves and a seat inside.
I wanted to draw the phone box with Lera Voe in the background. This is the view from the field behind the phone box. You can see the voe, and the hills beyond. The road is just behind the phone box in my drawing. “Voe” is a Shetland word meaning “sea inlet”.
Here is work in progress on the drawing.
Here is the article from the BBC mentioned above, as a PDF file.
Here is a group of phone boxes in Smithfield, London:
Phone boxes in Smithfield, EC1, London. See this blog post.
Here is one in Austin Friars, EC2, London: see this blog post.
These phone boxes , which were called Telephone Kiosks, were designed by Giles Gilbert-Scott in the 1920s and 30s. Giles Gilbert-Scott was a prolific architect, who also designed Cambridge University Library, the North Wing of the Guildhall in the City of London, and Bankside Power Station which is now Tate Modern.
The phone box at Lera Voe is a “K6” phone box, designed by Gilbert-Scott for the jubilee of George V in 1935, following his successful design of the K2 phone box in 1924. The K6 is distinguished from the K2 by the embossed crown, and the fact that it has 8 rows of windows, rather than the 6 rows of the K2.
It would be possible to date the phone box had I been more careful in drawing the crown. The crown is painted red on the Lera Voe phone box, as it was on the original phones boxes. Only in the 1990s did BT start painting the crowns gold.
Jane Sketching 