Sketching New Surroundings

How would you get to know a new area? Having seen a move away from Southampton coming for some time, I wondered how I would learn a new place - its layout and routes, its shops and amenities and its history and character.

Well, two months ago, Adam and I moved from Hampshire to Cambridgeshire.

It's a new part of the country to me, so the whole region calls for exploration but first things first - I want to feel that I know the immediate area, the old town of Godmanchester.

Equipped with a new pocket-sized sketchbook, spurred by a need for drawing practice and aided by a run of early rising, I went out on most mornings in August.

A number of houses here date from around 1600 and there are several later periods. It's a dense little jumble and there's plenty of interest. I may not have ticked off all of the most notable sights yet - I'm enjoying tackling them as they occur to me and as I visit new streets and corners.

So there's a body of work growing. I don't know what I'll do with it. As an experiment, I've arranged them over the map. I would be quite happy to keep going and fill the gaps. It's a good way to try different methods but I want them to look fairly similar.

Just a few of Godmanchester's buildings, sketched and plotted. 

Pubs, houses, shops and assorted places of assembly. Godmanchester has given me a good summer project and will keep me busy for a while.

Odds And Ends

It's the time to gather up loose fragments and offcuts for slightly mystified inspection.  Before I get stuck into my seasonal artwork campaign (by which I mean complicated Christmas cards), I've looked through a variety of pads and books from this year to collect some snippets, drawn for a variety of purposes.

A bunch of sketchbook oddments from this year.

Next up are a couple of Autumn sketches.  This week I spent a couple of days scrub-bashing with the countryside team in Queen Elizabeth Country Park, between Portsmouth and Petersfield.  We were lopping and sawing thorn bushes from the sides of a combe below Butser Hill and rolling them down to the valley, over rabbit holes in the damp grass.  I drew this in situ over lunch and coloured it at home, hoping to reflect the colours of the trees the other side of the A3.

Scrub-bashing on Butser Hill.

A few weeks earlier I wandered across London's Primrose Hill, into Camden and to the Cecil Sharp House, home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.  I have been in there once, a long time ago.  It's smart and slightly grave behind the rapidly thinning plane and birch.  It's good to get out and draw before breakfast - well, sometimes.

One of North London's mysterious gems, the Cecil Sharp House.

Here's to next year's drawing.  I think sketchbooks should be on my Christmas list.

Sketchbook Pages From A British Tour

In the past week I took my little pot of dipping ink around the country, in a big figure of eight from southern England to southern Scotland and back (the crossing point was just outside Thirsk).  There were fells and fens, busy marketplaces, mighty frontages and romantic ruins.  A few took some finding; others were brief stops off the road.  Here are a few sketches.

Not in geographical order:  sketches from a tour of Great Britain

A row-by-row explanation:

Greyfriars, Worcester
All Saints Church, Houghton Conquest, Bedfordshire
Kelso Abbey, Scottish Borders

The Bass Rock, the Isle of May and Tantallon Castle, Firth of Forth
The clouded summit of Cross Fell, Cumbria

Lichfield Cathedral shop garden, Staffordshire
Malmesbury market cross, Wiltshire
Aydon Castle, Northumberland

Buxton Pavilion, Derbyshire
Spofforth Castle, North Yorkshire

Ullswater, near Pooley Bridge, Cumbria
Peterborough Cathedral, Cambridgeshire
The iron bridge, Cragside, Northumberland

Oakham Buttercross, Rutland
Whittlesey Buttercross, Cambridgeshire

Glossop Market, Derbyshire
The gate house, Wallington, Northumberland

Melrose Abbey (seen from outside the wall of the close)
Malmesbury Abbey south door, Wiltshire
Penrith Castle, Cumbria

There I am, sitting on a grassy bank and squinting at the Bass Rock.

Where I Work

For the past three months I've had a desk at The Design Chapel.  It's one of the little cemetery chapels in Southampton Old Cemetery, converted for office use, with an upper floor installed.

My desk is behind those shelves, by the perpendicular piping.

Over the past week I've made daily sketches of the inside, picking views where the office furniture contrasts with the Victorian gothic walls.

Looking up from my desk to the dove window.

Upstairs, by the stained glass window.

The altar of printing.

The kitchen, built against the arches.

At this time of year, the owls are hooting and screeching outside by the end of the working day.  In Summer there are bats:  I don't know if they make use of the chapel, but it does have a little belfry.

The outside of the chapel is rich with detail, so I'll make a study of its Romanesque columns and medieval-y gargoyles before long.

Southampton Planning

Here's an artefact from the background work for my degree show, back in May of last year.  I was researching critical appraisal of the city's architecture, particularly addressing modernism.  Owen Hatherley's "The New Ruins Of Great Britain" was a big influence on the content of the project.  Another was Jones The Planner's two blog posts about Southampton - "Southampton Dreams" (July 2011) and "Oi Southampton Masterplanners!" (April 2012).

Mainly for my own reference and development of ideas, I drew the second of the two, copying the photos and writing snippets of the text.  It takes in the legacy of historical styles, the effects of the twentieth century, recent attempts at regeneration and the city council's master plan.

My drawing / Jones The Planner's blog post.

The blog is still turning out long and rewarding pieces, about Exeter, Bristol, London...  and Stockholm and Copenhagen!

Sketches from Stockholm

Following my post of drawings from Copenhagen, here are a few from the couple of days that I spent in Stockholm before getting the train to Denmark.

Sergels Torg office blocks

First, the domino-row of office blocks between Sergelgatan and Sveavägen, seen from the window of  Coppola Caffé, on Sergels Torg.  We spent a lot of time there, making the most of the free refills, which seem to be fairly standard in Copenhagen and Stockholm.  The café is in on of the big shopping centres overlooking Sergels Torg, which a big junction and plaza, and one of the hubs of the city.  There is street entertainment and stalls, surrounded by modern blocks and grand department stores.

Karlaplan

Karlaplan is a round park at the head of a smart boulevard, with a fountain at the centre.  It was quietly busy on a Sunday morning.  Here is the view, in slices, from the pinnacles of buildings above the ring of trees to the benches around the water.

The boats around Skeppsholmen

There's a completely different impression of the city from the waterfront - and there's a lot of waterfront, as Stockholm spreads over a number of islands.  We crossed the bridge to Skeppsholmen and walked right around, looking at the boats in their berths and watching ferries zip back and forth, interspersed with a few Baltic cruise ships.

Coppola Caffé

Finally some café sketches.  I enjoyed sitting still at the centre of a busy city - but with more time in Stockholm I could have kept myself very busy.

Sketches from Copenhagen

I've been on holiday and I need to tell you about it.  I'm turning the lights off, so settle down for my slideshow, with a flexidisc of local music in the background and a plate of well-travelled foreign sweets.

Copenhagen from (nearly) the water and (nearly) the air

The view from the waterside steps of Amaliehaven,
including the opera house and the royal theatre.

The first thing that Adam and I did, after leaving bags at the hotel and finding coffee and cake, was to go up the Rundetårn for a view.  The first impression is that Copenhagen is bristling with spires and steeples and spirals and spikes.  I filled a page with towers of all kinds and in all directions, not knowing yet which were the main sights.

The view from the Rundetårn, on the first day, and the Glyptoteket, on the last.

I fixated upon the "pile-of-onions" construction, which I suppose has a proper name.  There will be a half-dome on top of a balcony, on top of an onion dome, balanced on a ring of balls, on top of an another onion dome, on top of a colonnade, on top of another dome, on top of a belfry.  The most important buildings are topped off with a series of crowns before the weathervane and cross.

The little roof café of Illum department store became one of our favourite places to drink coffee and play with panoramic functions.  On the last day we found another terrace, on top of the Glyptoteket (helpful translation:  Glyptotek), a large museum of antiquities, palms and impressionism.  It's right by Tivoli gardens and the fairground rides that are the source of screams that punctuate the day.

The opera house and royal theatre again,
with the new bridge.

The waterfront gives a different kind of view.  Studded along it are grand modern edifices:  the Royal Library (the "Black Diamond"), the Royal Theatre, the Opera House, modern apartment blocks and now a new sliding bridge from Nyhavn to Christianshavn.

I spent a lot of time sitting and sketching, changing cartridges over, letting watercolours dry - or giving up and taking photos to work from later.

Nyhavn is the main tourist strip, being a picturesque row of coloured harbourside houses.  If you've seen a guidebook to Copenhagen or Denmark, it's probably on the cover.  For those arriving on tours, it's the first destination.  Coming from any other direction, as I did, it is currently obscured a little by the ongoing work on a new underground line.  I'm a sucker for a lightship, so here is the Gedser Rev.

The colourful waterside buildings of Nyhavn.

Building and Buildings

Building work is a peppercorn in the sugarbowl of urban holidaymaking.  It's hard not to be disappointed when the picturesque fountains are dry, the boulevard is being torn up and the station is surrounded by fences.  I've already mentioned the underground work in Copenhagen, and I'm sure it's a wonderful thing in the long term.  Rosenborg Castle was semi-shrouded.  A local paper showed one of the statues being lifted from the roof for safety during renovation.

Rosenborg Castle, undergoing renovation.

The modern buildings are dotted about too.  We marvelled every day at the international style SAS hotel.  The national bank headquarters are like the SAS building lying flat, and clad like a fortress.  Nykredit has a whole plaza of buildings with glass, sharp angles and gaps underneath.

Modernist blocks.

More towers and courtyards.

The sculpture garden at Louisiana.

Two departures, outside Copenhagen

We took a train up the Öresund coast to Humlebæk to visit Louisiana.  The gallery holds 20th century modern art, ancient pottery and a temporary exhibition of Yoko Ono, but the main attraction was the garden full of Danish and international sculpture.  I sat on the manicured lawn, first in very gentle rain and later in hot sun, drawing the stones and looking across to Sweden.

A few miles further north is Helsingør.  Being not only the setting of Hamlet, but the shortest journey for booze-cruising Swedes, everything is as cartoonishly Danish as possible, in its run-down way.  The streets are hung with flags; the ferries chug in and out, and the shops declare the price comparisons for various spirits.  Adam calls it a cross between Dover and Stratford-upon-Avon.  I started drawing on the train back, thinking that I must look like the most patriotic little Danish boy, filling a page with red and white flags.

Danetastic Helsingør.

People are worth drawing too

To finish off, here is a jumble of people.  I've arranged them for a two-page spread in a newspaper, which I hope will all go ahead in the next few weeks [EDIT:  it did!].  I didn't get to include the English morris men, some of whom were on our flight home, after performing on the waterfront.  Airports are not easy when you're covered in bells.

A spread of people drawn on holiday.

New Forest - Work In Progress

My favourite bit of non-town to head to is the part of the New Forest between Lyndhurst and Beaulieu.  The fastest I've ever managed the cycle ride to Lyndhurst was 39 minutes - although that may have been the time when I set out around 4am on a Saturday and went over the Millbrook and Redbridge flyovers.  Sometimes I come back on the Hythe ferry.

Drawing near Lyndhurst.

I love simply riding steadily on the roads.  Beaulieu Road undulates consistently (though generally downhill) as it runs south from Lyndhurst.  I love the open skies of the heathland, the fine sand between rows of heather and the medieval feel of the low pine groves.  It's Medieval and yet somehow Californian.

For me, it's a surprise to be in such a quiet place, even with groups of cyclists and classic car drivers, and pylons and the Fawley oil refinery usually visible.  I love the occasional trig points and burial mounds, opposite ends of the timeline of human activity.

Demo for a piece based on the New Forest.

I'm trying to put a piece together about it all.  My work is usually about busy details, not vast space, so it's a challenge to evoke the enigmatic silence, the wide sky and the warm colours of gorse and heather.

One Tall Building In London

Since you asked...  how many of these can you identify?

No, it's not that London shot from Star Trek Into Darkness.

Tall Buildings In London

Fresh from my workings for an upcoming project...  how many of these can you identify?

London's big buildings

East Anglia 2

Here are a few drawings from the trip to East Anglia.  The plans (mentioned last week) changed somewhat:  the Beccles / Saxmundham / Aldeburgh day became Cambridge; the Winterton / Cromer day became Bury St. Edmunds.  Both were my first visit, and there was more to see in Great Yarmouth.

A group of us visited Eltham Palace, outside London, for its odd mixture of Tudor and Art Deco.  I hadn't noticed Gilbert Ledward's 1930s stone carvings set above the porch, representing mountain climbing, sports, gardening and seafaring.

Drawings from Cambridge, Bury St. Edmunds, Great Yarmouth and London.

In Cambridge the exams were ending.  We saw students soaking each other with champagne and later heading out to dinners in matching jackets.  I was sitting on a shaded bank, drawing King's College Chapel and the tops of punting poles, when I heard a soft American voice saying "Don't move an inch...":  she wanted to photograph the artist for her daughter's "Anglophile scrapbook".

Cambridge:  one of the rooms in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Great Yarmouth's characteristic layout, scores of long, narrow, parallel alleyways ("rows") leading away from the quay, is still partially intact.  In the aftermath of heavy wartime bombing, many features dating back to the 17th Century were found hidden behind later walls.  A lot of the material was gathered together in a few semi-restored Row Houses.  It's a surprisingly large collection with a lot to enjoy, from elaborate plaster ceilings to hard-hat cellars.  The attendant dashed through after us to hang out the authentic washing on the line in the yard.

Great Yarmouth Row Houses:  the inside is all like this.

Sadly, the Olympia Cafeteria is no more.  It was a palace of pink and yellow plastic on Marine Parade with every kind of lowbrow seaside food.  Its navy-and-brown replacement might be just the same but I just don't want to find out.  We went to Las Palmas Cafeteria instead.

East Anglia

The forest of times and station codes.

That's where I'm heading for a few days.

It's a complicated, finely-planned trip, with some time in London on the way.  There will be many trains and I'll see some place I've never visited - ie. any of Suffolk - mostly on flying visits:  Lowestoft, Saxmundham, Beccles and Aldeburgh, where the festival is in full swing.

Let's hope I get some good drawing done.

Ibstone, Bucks

I spent the weekend in High Wycombe for a wedding.  The reception was a few miles out at Ibstone.  On Saturday morning Adam and I explored the bluebell-filled woods, but it wasn't until the next day that I went further into the village and saw the standing stone that gives the settlement its name.  I've read now that it was Hibba's historic boundary stone between Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire.

Between breakfast and checking out, I hadn't time to go as far as the church, but here's a sketchbook page from my brief exploration.  Here you will find:

• The standing stone (twice) and detail of its lichen,
• The perfect cricket pitch with its square, nets, club house and rusting roller,
• Local flora, trees and gorse in the tussocky ground around the stone,
• The row of communication:  telephone box (disused, but a notice about planned renovation says that "It will be beautiful"), post box, noticeboards, bus stop and telegraph pole,
• Play equipment and benches dedicated to villagers of long standing,
• Cottages and houses with hedges, gates and an Airedale,
• The Fox Country Inn,
• The red kite that circled above, and a couple of gliders.

Andy and Jess's wedding was heaps of fun:  singable hymns, classic cars, a hog roast, extensive cheese board, chocolate fountains and raucous dancing.  The couple are on the road now and we all wish them every kind of happiness.

The High Court Of Chivalry

A heraldry update

In my recent post about the College Of Arms, I mentioned the most recent case heard by the Earl Marshal.

Well, yesterday, at the Beware Of The Leopard bookstall in Bristol's St Nicholas Market, I found a complete transcript of the hearing of The Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens of Manchester, against The Manchester Palace Of Varieties Limited, in 1954.

Honestly, I'm not fascinated.  Nevertheless, it was a nice find.

I didn't leave without another nice little book on Heraldry.  This was a King Penguin (printed by the Curwen Press, which deserves its own post), from 1946, written by the Richmond Herald of the time, Anthony Wagner, with plenty of colour plates of arms, pedigrees and designs from the College Of Arms library.

Here are a couple of my drawings from Bristol Cathedral.

Edinburgh to Southampton

I've just spent a week travelling down through Great Britain, seeing places that I felt I should have seen by now, making rough sketches wherever I could.

Edinburgh:  The Albacini Collection, Scottish National Gallery
Birmingham:  Smallbrook
London:  Prommers in the gallery, Royal Albert Hall

It was quite an itinerary, by plane, train, bus, taxi, underground, coach and a lot of walking.  Here goes:

Saturday:  Southampton to Edinburgh
Sunday:  Glasgow and Edinburgh
Monday:  North Queensferry and Edinburgh
Tuesday:  Edinburgh to Berwick Upon Tweed, Morpeth, Newcastle, Durham, Darlington and New Marske (near Redcar)
Wednesday:  Darlington to Northallerton, Ripon, Harrogate, York, Wakefield and Birmingham
Thursday:  Birmingham, Coventry, Rugby, Milton Keynes and London
Friday:  London and Southampton

Some of these were very short visits.  In the case of Morpeth, a delayed train left me with only enough time to try a hat on in Green (Agriculture) Co. Country Store.  In some places I had time to visit cathedrals with the help of the 1960s Pitkin guides.  I heard the accents change and enjoyed stayed with a couple of friends.  But really, I did a lot of walking.

Here is nearly everything from the sketchbook:

North Queensferry:  The Forth rail and road bridges (3)
Edinburgh:  Scottish National Gallery (2)
Berwick-Upon-Tweed:  The Royal Border Bridge
Newcastle:  station portico
Durham:  University library and Cathedral (2)
Northallerton:  The Fleece
Ripon:  market square and town hall (2)
York:  Minster (2)
Wakefield:  Hepworth Wakefield gallery and The Black Cloud; Unity Hall / Unity House / Buzz Nightclub (3)
Birmingham:  Smallbrook (2)
Coventry:  Cathedral and Bull Yard (2)
Rugby:  St. Andrew's Church
London:  Prommers in the gallery, Royal Albert Hall (3)

I didn't get the colours out much.  Here is the train across the Forth and another view of the Proms.