Westminster – Jane Sketching

Temple Place Cabdrivers’ shelter, WC2

Here is the Cab Drivers Shelter near Temple Station.

Cab drivers’ shelter, Temple Place. Sketched 5th March 2026 2pm in Sketchbook 16

There are 13 of these shelters surviving. All are now listed. This one was built in around 1900 and listed in 1987¹. Here’s a map from the Historic England site showing the location of all the shelters in London. interestingly they are all to the North of the river.

Map of the 13 listed cab drivers’ shelters. Temple place circled. Map from Google, on https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/news/13th-cabmens-shelter-in-london-listed/

Eager diners queue at the shelter before it closes.

I sketched this one on the first sunny day in spring. I’d arrived there at around 1:30pm. There was a long line of people outside and several tables. While I was doing the sketch, the manager closed the window and the queue dissipated. Then she came out and packed up all the tables. I just managed to sketch one table before they all disappeared. This shelter closes at 2pm.

Two men walked past me, engrossed in a conversation about a colleague. “He has a strong survival component” observed one of them, somewhat ruefully.

Then there was a man pushing a bicycle. “Ah!” he said, noticing me, “ink. Real ink!” I was indeed using real ink. I held up the fountain pen to show him. “I love the sound of ink on paper!” he said. I hadn’t thought about the sound of ink on paper. I noticed it, from that moment on.

Here’s a map showing the location of the shelter. As you see, it is near Temple Station, which accounts for the flux of people passing.

Here is the sketchbook spread. My aim is to sketch more of these shelters – maybe even to sketch all of them.

Historic England listing: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1357301?section=official-list-entry ↩︎

Carting Lane Sewer Gas Destructor Lamp, London WC2

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.

There’s an article about the lamps on this link .

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.

St Mary Le Strand, WC2

Here is a sketch of St Mary Le Strand, which is the church in the middle of the Strand at Aldwych. I sketched this from outside Somerset House. As you see it was really busy there. The south part of Aldwych is being closed off to motor traffic and made a pedestrian-only route. It will be great when it’s finished, but right now it means that the busy pavements are narrowed with barriers and there are many types of confusion.