This is the Old Blackfriars, 52 Castle St, Aberdeen.
The Old Blackfriars, Aberdeen AB11 5BB, sketched 24 June 2024, 20cmx14cm (A5), [commission]
I worked on this drawing standing in the large cobbled square called Castlegate. A passer-by walked up to where I was standing, and took an interest in the picture. I’ll call him Campbell. He had much to tell me, a visitor, about the city of his birth. He had been brought up in what he described as the “tenements” on the dock. “Six of us to a room,” he said. He’d trained as a coppersmith, and found work in the engine rooms of ships and submarines, making “boilers, pipes and flanges”.
I was sketching this pub at the request of a client who had happy memories of their time there. Campbell also had happy memories of his lively times at the pub, although his experiences pre-dated those of my client by some decades. It was a pub for folk working the docks Campbell told me, and “they had a hard life”.
Uncharacteristically for British people, we talked politics. The general election was coming up. My new friend had little time for politicians of any stripe. They don’t know what they are doing, he asserted. “It’s like watching a drunk man trying to walk down Union Street”. He indicated the wide straight street across the cobbles, and with an articulate hand gesture demonstrated the erratic movements of the inebriated.
I enjoyed his entertaining stories as I sketched. He went on his way when I was at the pen-and-ink stage. I hope that some of his stories made it into the finished drawing.
Sketching on location in Castlegate, Aberdeen
The main colours are: (DS=Daniel Smith watercolour) – ultramarine blue finest (Schmincke) – burnt umber (DS) – haze pink (Schminke) – in the stones – rose madder permanent (DS) – in the stones For the details: – permanent yellow deep – pyrrole red – mars yellow – acrylic gold paint
Aberdeen is “The Grey City” for some. But for anyone who doubts that there really is pink in the stone, I include a photo of the cobbles.
Cobbles at my feet
This was a commission. Thank you to my client for inspiring me to draw this historic pub, and for their permission to post the pictures here. They kindly sent me a photo of the picture in its frame:
photo credit: my client G.
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“The Coach” Clerkenwell, Sketched 20th June 2024 in Sketchbook 14
I sketched this after I had sketched “Gunmakers” in nearby Eyre Street Hill. Above the pub sign is a model, just visible on the right of my drawing.
The Coach pub sign: a gun carriage?
The model is a gun carriage. I wondered what the connection was to The Coach, and if there was any connection to Gunmakers on Eyre Street Hill. But no, it is the symbol of The Cannon Brewery. This brewery was founded 1720, in nearby St John Street. It was acquired by Taylor Walker in 1930. I have this information from http://breweryhistory.com. So that explains the cannon.
At the top of the pub, the medallion names the pub as “The Coach and Horses” in white relief work.
The pub website says: “The Coach was established in 1790, and has been at the heart of the lively Clerkenwell community for generations.”
British History Online describes a pub called The Cock Inn, which was part of a sale in 1695:
At the time of the sale [1695], the land was mostly taken up by two fields of pasture: Gardiner’s Field to the north and the larger Sir John Oldcastle’s Field to the south. There was a cluster of buildings and a large rubbish dump or laystall in the south-eastern corner, in the area of Hockley-in-the-Hole. Chief of these buildings was the Cock inn, the forerunner of the present-day Coach and Horses in Ray Street.
The current building dates from 1897 according to this source:
All the eighteenth-century public houses in the area have been rebuilt or have disappeared entirely. The Apple Tree in Mount Pleasant was rebuilt in the 1870s, and the Coach and Horses in Ray Street in 1897
So it looks as though the pub was there already in 1695 as the Cock Inn, was established as The Coach and Horses in 1790 (according to the pub website) and rebuilt in 1897. It was renamed The Coach in 2018.
Having closed on 31st July 2015, this pub reopened on 16th January 2018 as the Coach with its Taylor Walker/Cannon Brewery sign frame retained.
People sometimes ask me how I determine the viewpoint in my sketches. Often, as here, it is determined by practical rather than artistic considerations. I need somewhere to sketch, out of the way, not in the road, and with a clear view. I don’t carry a seat, though sometimes I wish that I did. But here, like a miracle, a seat presented itself.
This perhaps had been a phone junction box, but no more. Now it was a seat. I commandeered it.
I did the pen-and-ink on location and then added the colour back at my desk.
The colours here are:
Fired Gold Ochre for the bricks
Ultramarine Blue plus Phthalo Blue Turquoise for the sky
All greys and blacks are Burnt Umber with the blues
There’s a bit of Mars Yellow in some of the brickwork and the pillars.
Here is the pub “Gunmakers” in Eyre Street Hill, Farringdon.
“Gunmakers” in Eyre Street Hill EC1R, sketched 20th June 2024 in sketchbook 14
Eyre Street Hill is a small sloping street in Farringdon, within the triangle made by Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell Road, and the Farringdon Road.
It slopes down to the River Fleet which is now below ground. I marked the approximate route of the Fleet on the map below:
It is a very old street, laid out in the 1720s as “Little Bath Street”. “British History Online” contains a detailed history of the area. This tells me that here and to the north was called “Coldbath Fields” in around 1719. The small houses in Eyre St were beside the Cold Bath, “a privately run hydropathic establishment opened in the late 1690”. This was on the edge of town. But then the came a distillery, a smallpox hospital and a workhouse.
“On the north-western ground, now largely occupied by Mount Pleasant Sorting Office, a distillery was built in the 1730s, and a smallpox hospital in the 1750s. These were joined towards the end of the eighteenth century by the prison, the Middlesex House of Correction, which became notorious for the brutality of its regime. South of the Cold Bath, near the old and insalubrious quarter called Hockley-in-the-Hole, the parish workhouse, built in the 1720s, was greatly enlarged in 1790.”
Then Rosebery Avenue and Farringdon Road were built, with much demolition and reconstruction. By the beginning of the twentieth century, this area became part of “Little Italy”, a centre of the Italian Community. St Peter’s Church, on Clerkenwell Road, is still “the Italian Church”.
I can find no reference to this pub, or to gunmaking in the area. The building looks like one of the ones built in 1812:
The sun catches the castellated building.
“Today the oldest structures are the small, single-bay houses with shopfronts at Nos 33–37, dating from the early nineteenth century and fairly typical of the rebuilding that took place in the area at that time. Nos 33 and 35 were erected as a pair around 1812 by Thomas Abbott, builder, of Leather Lane.”
The Sekforde EC1R 0HA, Clerkenwell, sketched March 2024 12″ x 9″ [commission]
This watercolour was specially commissioned to celebrate a happy event.
The colours are:
Mars Yellow
Fired Gold Ochre
Ultramarine Blue
Burnt Umber
plus some Horadam Random Grey, some Daniel Smith Green Serpentine Genuine, and Pyrrol Red for the street sign and road marker.
Gold paint for the lettering.
Admire the bricks! I am very pleased with this effect. It was done by applying a rubber resist, “pebeo drawing gum” to the paper before I did any painting. The paint does not adhere to the rubber resist. When I had done all the colour, I rubbed off the rubber resist and hey presto! bricks.
Thank you to my client for their encouraging words and for inspiring me to make this picture of The Sekforde. Here are some details of the drawing.
Vauxhall Tea House – 2:30pm 7 March 2024, in sketchbook 14
The tea I drank was their “Russian Smoky Tea”.
I’ve visited the Tea House many times. Here is an outside view from June 2022
Tea House Theatre, external view, June 2022 in Sketchbook 12
They have all sorts of theatrical events on their tiny stage. I enjoy “Don’t Go Into The Dungeon” where talented actor Jonathan Goodwin plays all of the characters to amazing effect. He specialises in Victorian mysteries. The next one is “The Hound of the Baskervilles”. Dinner is served before the performance. With scones for dessert.
Here’s where it is, just a 5 minute walk from Vauxhall Station.
And in more detail:
Here’s my sketchbook page:
Sketchbook 14
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I was expecting the hidden alleyway to be deserted on a Tuesday lunchtime, and so it was for the first hour. But then it became suddenly busy. A small ambulance backed carefully down the alleyway in front of me and parked. Its doors opened and two paramedics went round to the back of the car. They lifted out their equipment and walked calmly off down the alley. After that excitement, a certain calm returned to the alley, insofar as calm is possible a few hundred metres from Kings Cross.
I carried on sketching, now working on the beer barrels to the left of the picture. But the calm did not last long. Two cars arrived and people dressed in orange hi-vis vests scrambled out. They unlocked a gate off the picture to the left, and went in, leaving their car on the pavement. Then a van arrived, it parked directly in front of me, and a further person in a hi-vis outfit got out. He looked across the bonnet of his van and saw me sketching. “Oh, sorry,” he said, “Am I in your way?” I said that yes, he kind of was. I stood ready, however, to concede the space to him, as he looked important and determined in his bright orange overalls and hard hat. But to my surprise he grinned at me, “Ten minutes! I’ll be just ten minutes!”. He rushed off through the gate where the other people had gone. I abandoned the beer barrels and worked on the roofs.
The roofs were quite a challenge, and they productively occupied the 8 minutes until the driver came rushing back out, looking triumphant, accompanied by a selection of the people who’d arrived earlier. “I told this woman I’d be ten minutes,” he explained to his entourage. He raised a hand to me in greeting, got into his car and rumbled off, leaving the other people standing on the cobbles. I asked them what they were working on. “The bridge,” they said. Oh yes, I was standing on a bridge. The train lines were below.
Annotated Google map of the location.
It’s in a labyrinth of roads and railway lines just to the east of Kings Cross mainline station.Here are some maps to show the location. Walk east from Kings Cross, about 10 minutes.
On the maps, the blue line represents the River Fleet, which is alongside the Kings Cross Road, underground. It flows from left to right across the map (West to East) and then heads South down to join the Thames beneath Blackfriars Bridge.
The river Fleet, before it became an underground sewer in 1825, flowed along the western side of Pancras Road and then eastward along the south side of the common, crossing the old highway (now Gray’s Inn Road) north of St. Chad’s Place.
‘Battle Bridge Estate’, in Survey of London: Volume 24, the Parish of St Pancras Part 4: King’s Cross Neighbourhood, ed. Walter H Godfrey and W McB. Marcham (London, 1952), pp. 102-113. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol24/pt4/pp102-113 [accessed 7 February 2024].
St Chad’s Place slopes down towards the River Fleet. This area was once the location of St Chad’s Well, a spring said to have health-giving properties. It operated from about 1815 to 1860. I found a picture in the London Picture Archives, reproduced below with their permission.
A river, a bridge, a well, a passage and a music venue. It’s amazing what you find.
Looking east from where I was sketching. Street art in St Chad’s PlaceIn St Chad’s Place, looking North towards the Kings Cross Road.North entrance of St Chad’s Place. The cyclist is coming out of St Chad’s Place and into the Kings Cross Road.Street name in the Kings Cross Road
Here is work in progress on the sketch:
The colours are:
For the sky and pavement – a special new colour, Schminke Horadam “Random grey” – “formulated each year from surplus pigments”. This is the 2022 edition.
Rose madder permanent – also on the pavement
Mars Yellow
Ultramarine Blue
Green Serpentine Genuine
Buff Titanium
Fired Gold Ochre in the brickwork
Burnt Umber
Arches Aquarelle paper in a sketchbook made by Wyvern Bindery (Sketchbook 14).
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“The House they left Behind”, 27 Ropemakers Fields, London E14 8BX, sketched in Sketchbook 14 28th Jan 2024 at 2pm
The London Inheritance article shows a 1986 photo taken by the author’s father. Painted on the side of the building was the sign:
THE HOUSE THEY LEFT BEHIND BUILT 1857 RESTORED 1985
The sign has now been painted over. The wall, which is on the left of my drawing, is now completely white. But the name lives on and appears on current maps. Here is a map showing where the house is.
The building is now residential, but was previously a pub. It was “left behind” by the bombs dropped on London by the Luftwaffe in the 1939-45 conflict. The website “Layers of London” provides maps of bomb damage in London. Here is the area.
Map showing bomb damage. Classified from Total Destruction (Black), through Seriously Damaged (Dark Red) to Clearance Areas (Green). credit: https://www.layersoflondon.org/map/overlays/bomb-damage-1945 Map provided by London Metropolitan Archives. Geo-referenced with the support of the National Library of Scotland
The map is based on 1:2500 Ordnance Survey sheets originally published in 1916. The bomb damage was recorded on these maps by hand soon after it happened. The circle represents where a V2 rocket landed. The red area shows buildings that were classified as “seriously damaged – doubtful if repairable”. As you see, the pub, labelled “P.H.”and outlined in red, is shown as undamaged.
I found more information on Bomb Damage Maps from a National Geographic article on a book about the maps. This article also provides a detailed key to the colours on the map. The book is “The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps” by Laurence Ward.
“A diary entry included in the book, from architect Andrew Butler on April 20, 1941, gives an idea of what the work was like:
For the block I have started on—eight floors high with two flats on each floor—has had its whole face ripped off … I found it possible to stand on part of the roof. So, clutching a broken chimney, I surveyed the damage there. My notebook became very messy. What with the dust and soot, wet filth and the perspiration of fluster on my hands, it was difficult to read what I wrote. The notes served their purpose however when, after drying the book, I had to transcribe them into a report.”
Here is my work in progress on the sketch. Thank you to the author of “A London Inheritance” for providing the stimulus for this expedition. Thank you also to the friends and family of local resident David Newell-Smith, on whose memorial bench I completed the sketch. His dates are given as 1937-2017. He would have been a boy when the bombs were falling.
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Here is the Market Café, sketched from the “Cat and Mutton Bridge” on 19th January 2024.
Market Café, 2 Broadway Market, London E8. Sketched 19th January 2024, 15:30, in Sketchbook 14.
As you see, this building is the former pub, the “Sir Walter Scott”. A pub was on this site in 1836. The wording on the building says “rebuilt 1909”. It closed as a pub in 1999 according to “pubhistory.com”. The Market Café now operates from the ground floor.
The website of Broadway Market gives a history of this area. In the early 19th century, the canal was the major means of freight transport, until the coming of the railways in the 1840s.
In 1812 “The Regent Canal Act” was passed and the Regent’s Canal constructed. This final link was direct into the River Thames at Limehouse, completing the passageway of heavy freight to Birmingham Manchester and the entire industrial North. (It should be noted that this was at the time of horse-drawn stage coaches and ox-laden wagons).
The new Regents Canal became a central pivot for industry and supplies. Timber warehouses grew, Gas light and Coke companies were established and this once rural backwater had become a major hub of enterprise.
This “once rural backwater” evidently needed a pub. Sir Walter Scott was a Scottish historian, novelist, poet, and playwright. He died in 1832, which must have been around the time this pub was named and the area was growing in population and importance.
The National Library of Scotland provides a wonderful side-by-side map, so you can see how the area looked previously, alongside a modern map. Click the image below to go to their marvellous site. You can shift the images around and expand them: both maps change at once. It’s fascinating.
I had a look at an 1870 OS map. The Public House “P.H.” existed here in 1870. The road currently called Broadway Market was called “Pritchards Road” then. You can see the rows of terraced houses along the canal, gone now, and the “Coal Wharf” and “Wood Wharf” which used to be on the south side of the canal.
Broadway Market is now a street of modern coffee shops and small enterprises, with a street market of stalls down the middle. The jeweller William Cheshire has a workshop at the south end of the street. Climpson Coffee are further up. There are bakers, grocers, greengrocers and an opticians. At the North end, Broadway Market gives onto London Fields, a lovely park, with a lido.
It’s a great area to explore.
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I walked through the City lanes towards London Bridge and passed by the Jamaica Wine House embedded, as it seemed, in a canyon amongst towers.
Jamaica Wine House, 12:30pm 30th August 2023 in Sketchbook 13.
The Cheesegrater and 22 Bishopsgate are the office blocks in the left background and One Leadenhall is under construction on the right.
This is a very old part of the City. Although some buildings have changed, the road layout still retains something of the feeling of Dickensian London. There has been a pub or coffee house on the site of the Jamaica Wine House since 1652. The current building dates from 1868 according to the Historic England List Entry (number 1079156).
Off the picture to the left is MacAngusWainright bespoke tailors and shirtmakers, at number 4 St Michael’s Alley. This shop used to be John Haynes＆Co, the jewellers.
St Michael Cornhill is visible to the left in the background, and you can just see the weathervane on St Peter upon Cornhill in the centre of the picture.
My drawing of St Peter upon Cornhill is in this post:
I went out to look for more gas lights in the City. There was rain, and the back alleys were wet. I couldn’t find any more gaslights. At the South East extreme…
Location of the Jamaica Wine House in the alleys between Lombard Street and Cornhill. (Map (c) OpenStreetMap contributors)
The picture took an hour on location and I finished it at my desk.
Chair kindly lent by MacAngusWainright
The colours in the picture are:
Fired Gold Ochre – my go-to colour for brick and sandstone
Ultramarine blue, Lavender, and Cerulean Blue for the sky
Burnt Umber in the sky
All greys and blacks are Ultramarine Blue with Burnt Umber
There’s a bit of Iridescent Gold on the weathervane of St Peter upon Cornhill
The trees in St Michael’s garden are Serpentine Genuine with some Permanent Yellow Medium.
St Michael on Cornhill is Buff Titanium with some Burnt Umber and Ultramarine Blue.
Done on Arches 300gsm NOT watercolour paper in a sketchbook by Wyvern Bindery, Hoxton. Thank you to McAngusWainwright, city tailor, for the kind loan of the chair.
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Sketching is a way to fill those “waiting” times with creative activity.
..at the airport…..waiting for lunch…..before dinner…..before the others arrived……waiting for the food….
I had an A5 sketchbook with cartridge paper. This cartridge paper behaved differently from the watercolour paper I am used to. It was more suited to quick sketches.
It was hot weather. Outdoors the paint dried quickly. Here’s the hotel from the other side of the road, drawn very quickly, about 20 minutes.
Hôtel de France, Sainte-Croix 18 August 2023
I went to the swimming pool. On the way back I stopped to sketch the sloping hill and a house in the trees.
Here’s a view of the bar at the hotel.
Here’s a flip-through of the sketchbook. 20 seconds of silent video. [This video and the gallery beneath may not show on email or phones so if there’s a problem please see the web version of this post]
Sketchbook flip-through. Sketchbook from the Vintage Paper Company.
I’ve sketched in Switzerland before. Here are some other other drawings I’ve done in the same location:
Waiting in London City airport… Breakfast… Looking out of the window… Walking around… A rich cultural spectacle: Photographs absolutely not allowed, but sketching was OK. It was very crowded,…
Here is 23 rue du Petit-Montreux, Sainte-Croix, Vaud. I sketched this house after breakfast. The sun was bright and I rushed out into the crisp morning. It took me…
It was raining in Switzerland. Here is a sketch I did looking out of the window of the Hôtel de France, Sainte-Croix, Vaud. The building with the flags is…
I visited the Hôtel de France, Sainte-Croix in Vaud, Switzerland. Here is the hotel, from the street outside, just after I arrived. I had to wait in Geneva train…
The weather in the Jura mountains is changing. This is climate change, the residents tell me. Once, the snow came reliably every year, bringing skiers. Now, the snow is…
Here is a machine that was used to make music boxes: The machine is about 100 years old. It still works. It sits with its colleagues and companion machines…
This is the church. Drawn and coloured on location, about 1 degree C. That’s snow in the foreground. Then later, it was colder. Hotel de France, drawn from the…
This building is on the Rue des Rasses, in Sainte-Croix, Vaud, Switzerland. For maps, see end of this article. There is much that is interesting about this building: there…
Snowfield behind the church. Painted with melted snow as I forgot to bring water. All done standing up as everything was wet and cold. Snow blew from the roof…
Jane Sketching 