The Shard – Jane Sketching

The Shard from The Tower

From the Tower of London on the North bank of the Thames, you can see the Shard on the South Bank.

Pre-lockdown, I sketched this sitting on a stone bench on the slope to the West of the Tower of London. There were seagulls in the air. Children hurtled down the slope on bicycles, with parents jogging awkwardly behind. Young people threw their arms around each other and photographed themselves.

I worked on my drawing.

It started to rain. Then it really poured with rain. The children scuttled under the overhanging roof of the visitor centre. The young people laughed and rushed off. I had to pack up very quickly. The seagulls remained.

I had finished the pen and ink. I added the colour at home. I tried out some experimental techniques.

For the cobbles I used the wrapping of a pack of mandarin oranges.

To get the sharp edges of the Shard, I used masking tape.

I made this picture on a sheet of Jackson’s 300gsm cold-pressed watercolour paper, 12″ x 10″, using Daniel Smith and Winsor and Newton watercolours. The colours are Phthalo Turquoise (W&N), Fired Gold Ochre (DS), Perylene Maroon (DS) and Mars Yellow (DS). The cobblestones also have some Iridescent Moonstone (DS), which makes them sparkle. I made the tree with a marvellous new Tree Brush, also from Jackson’s.

Brushes: Jackson’s “Badger” tree brush series 602, and Jackson’s “Raven” brush series 528.

A walk to Wapping

Today was a beautiful day. It was a day to go for a walk.

I went to the river. Near Old Billingsgate I looked under London Bridge and saw Tower Bridge and HMS Belfast. This is a 15 minute sketch, watercolour-only, no pen.

Onwards towards the East, I stood on Sugar Quay, which has only just re-opened after years of being closed while the nearby hotel is built.

Here is the Shard, in context, from a wooden bench on Sugar Quay.

This map shows my walk:

Tourists congregate around Tower Bridge. East of Tower Bridge, after St Katherines Dock, there are no tourists at all. It was suddenly very quiet. I went down “Alderman Steps”. There was this great view. The wind was fierce, and my eyes were streaming. I had a go anyway. Two mallards bobbed around amongst the floating quays, chatting away, looking around as if searching for something lost.

Then I went on East. I had lunch in a hipster café called “Urban Baristas” on Wapping High Street.

Lunch at the hipster café “Urban Baristas”

A man at the next table discussed flats on his mobile phone. He said Shoreditch was too expensive, so he was looking in Wapping. He’d found a good place, a view of the river, open plan, lots of space. Maybe it was offices he was describing, not flats.

Then I went on East. The river opens out here, it starts to feel more like an estuary. There are 1980s flats, brick-built, but in the river shores are the remains of the old trade: the old chains, the stanchions, huge shafts of timber, rotting piers.

Then the river bends again, and there’s a magnificent view of Canary Wharf.

I drew this in about an hour, sitting in sunlight spiked with the smell of someone else’s fish and chips.

Here is work in progress:

Here is me drawing:

The Shard from Borough Market

Walking back from Intaglio Printmaker in Southwark, I thought it would be a good idea to walk through Borough Market. It was not. The crowds were so closely pressed together, and walking and stopping, that I could make no headway through the main part of the market. So I went round the edge, and glimpsed the Shard, high above the roofs.

The roofs, and the lights, look old but they are not really old. The lights, the nearest ones, are gas lights, with real gas flames. They are recent. The market was re-created and enlarged in the late 1990s. It’s now easy to believe that it’s always been a thriving London market. But it hasn’t. The “Blueprint” website from developers CBRE says:

In the 1980s, the surrounding area of Borough Market had undergone severe decline. The market’s days as a wholesale hub were threatened by the growth of supermarket retailers and the nearby development of the New Covent Garden market in Vauxhall in the 1970s. By 1994, the market had as few as nine traders and an income of less than £400k per year…..

The first “green shoot” for the market emerged … in 1996. The market had hit rock bottom with little left but a few traders and a mobile barber’s stall operating from a caravan. Neil’s Yard Dairy approached the market seeking additional space in damp conditions for the preservation of their expanding cheese business. Damp space, according to [George] Nicholson [market chairman], “was something we had lots of.”

I drew this picture standing up in Stoney Street. There was a strong wind. Papers, mostly takeaway food wrappers, rushed along in the air as if they had somewhere to go.

There were huge crowds outside Monmouth coffee. The whole of Stoney Street, to the right of my picture, was occupied by people.

Astonishingly, cars appeared. This picture took about 45 minutes and in that time I must have seen about 10 cars, one every few minutes. They arrived and stopped, seeing the crowds. Then, no doubt consulting a GPS which said this was indeed a street, they pushed on.

People walked past me, eating food from wrappers or drinking beer from cans. One drinker rolled over to me. “Are you drawing a picture?” he leered, ready to make fun.

“No,” I replied, “I’m riding a bicycle.” In his drink-fuddled haze, he had a problem to process that.

He turned to his fellow drinkers. “She says she’s riding a bicycle,” he announced. His wise companions hurried him on.