More DLR

 If you've read enough of my posts, or looked at my profile you may know that I'm a secondary school teacher. Now, one of my self imposed tasks for the long summer holidays was to finish my drawings of the DLR stations. Well, at the start of the day I had 15 still to go, and I'm rapidly running out of holiday. So today I broke my daily record with no fewer than six stations. 

Stratford International

There are actually 3 Stratford Stations. At the Western end of this line is Stratford International. This is a rather misleadingly named station, since no actual International services depart from here. You can catch a direct national rail service to Ashford, and then catch the Eurostar from there. 

Stratford High Street

The second Stratford station - named appropriately Stratford - I already sketched when I did the District Line in 2019. The next after this is Stratford High Street, one of the oldest stations on the whole DLR. The next station, Abbey Road, has nothing to do with the famous Beatles album

Unfortunately it is one of the less visually impressive stations on the network. The next station is West Ham. I also sketched this when I did the District Lie, but I wasn't exactly happy with the sketch that I produced, and so this determined me to have another go at it today.

West Ham

Star Lane, the next station, is impressive, although it does slightly look as if the skeleton, the frame of the building has been buit but they haven't got round to installing the exterior walls yet -

Star Lane

The next station is Canning Town, which I sketched on both the Jubilee Line, and on the DLR line between Poplar and Beckton. After that is West Silverton, which is the very first station on the DLR that I ever sketched - a good 2 or 3 years ago. So that takes us to today's last sketch of the 6, Pontoon Dock.

Pontoon Dock

Docklands Light Railway Continued

 Pushing on towards Beckton, but not there yet - here are the latest: -

Docklands Light Railway Stations

 At the end of 2019 I gave myself the project of skeching every London Underground station – a project which continued for the first ouple of months of 2020 as well. I did manage to do it, but I have to be honest, for as much as I enjoyed drawing the 270 stations, the drawings themselves are frankly not brilliant. They’re pretty sketchy as you can see from a few selected sketches below.

I'm sure that you can see what I mean. They're okay, but not much better than that. Too sketchy. Then in the first lockdown of 2020 I decided to extend the project to the London Overground. The Overground has a more modest 112 stations. I took a lot more time and trouble over these, and as a result I think that I produced better sketches – again, there are some examples below which you can compare with the ones above.

Again, I think you should be able to see what I mean about these being better drawings. So starting in July 2021 I decided to draw all of the Docklands Light Railway stations. There are a modest 45 stations, some of which I have already sketched as part of the Underground or Overground. I have to admit, I’v been a little bit laid back over this. Here we are 5 weeks after starting and I’m not yet halfway. Still, I do think the sketches aren’t bad. So here are the ones I’ve done so far.

Needless to say - but I'm going to say it anyway - these images are all copyright. If you would like to copy or use them for any reason, then email me and ask. I have used legal redress in the past. 

Stylised town views

 As well as my visit to Coventry earlier this week, I’ve produced 3 variations on the same theme. I make no claim that it’s an original theme. Basically, you take a town, take its most iconic buildings and combine them together into stylised 2D front on street scenes. The first I did was this one of Port Talbot.

Producing a drawing like this is time consuming, but quite a rewarding process, especially if, like me, you like puzzles. Making a drawing like this is a bit of a puzzle in two ways. Firstly you’re using photographic references which are not, for the most part, from the angle you want. Or if they are, then the photo has the optical illusion of making them look like the buildings are slanting inwards and upwards – again, stop me if I’m getting too technical.Secondly, you have to try to work out how you want to make the buildings relate too each other – how you want to play with their relative sizes.

Well, in the space of a day and a half, this picture had become my best selling print on Etsy, so it wasn’t just me who liked it. Which encouraged me to make this next picture.

This is my other home town, Ealing – I should probably say my first home town. I was born in nearby Chiswick, and grew up in Hanwell in the London Borough of Ealing. I’d say that I  really started leaving home when I went to University, then I moved to Port Talbot in 1986.

This is Swansea. It’s my nearest city now, and I was intrigued to apply the same process that I applied to the first two pictures. Both of the first two have just over a dozen buildings each, while this one has a whopping 18.

Coventry Cathedral Visit

During the first lockdown in 2020 one of the ways I amused myself and kept my hand in was by making a series of detailed ink sketches of beautiful Britain. Of necessity these were all based on photographs. I made 32 altogether, mostly just ink sketches, although I did apply watercolour to a few. Of the 32, only about 5 depicted places I’d never been to before. Of all of them, I reckoned that Coventry Cathedral was the most appropriate for a day trip. I’ve already stayed in Edinburgh and then London this school holiday, but a couple of days ago the time was right, and so I went.

Now, I can pretty much guarantee that if you’d asked me my opinion of Coventry Cathedral a few years ago, the phrase ‘beautiful Britain’ wouldn’t have featured in my answer. But when I started on my Britain sketches last year, every time I googled to find out what other people considered examples of Britain’s best buildings, Coventry cathedral featured on a surprisingly large number of lists. It made me take another look at least. Then I made last year’s sketch, and to me there are few things that make you appreciate a building as much as sitting down to look closely and seriously at it while you try to sketch it.

Which is not quite the only reason why I made the trip on Tuesday. Not long after we first connected to the internet 20 and some years ago, I did a lot of research into my family history. My mum’s father’s mother was a Rainbow from Coventry. The Rainbows were, I believe, originally Huguenot silk weavers who originally settled in Spitalfields, then moved to the Midlands, and in the later 18^th and the first half of the 19^th century they were movers and shakers in the silk industry in Coventry, living in Foleshill. Then, in June of this year, the BBC showed a very good documentary called “Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain”. After I’d watched this, a visit to the cathedral went from being a possibility to a certainty.

Getting older is certainly to my mind preferable to the alternative, Still, one of the things that you have to guard against as you get older is becoming more inflexible and less ready to take on board different ideas and opinions from those you’ve held for a long time. 25 years ago I had no time for anything built after the First World War, which come to think of it was a ridiculous attitude anyway. Particularly as I started looking more closely at London Underground stations I came to appreciate futurism, modernism and art deco in architecture. Now, I’m starting to take a more open minded look at post war architecture. Okay, I somehow doubt that I’m ever likely to become a believer in the virtues of brutalism, but what the hell. Although Coventry Cathedral wasn’t consecrated until 1962, it really is a child of the 50s, born in the same time as the Festival of Britain. In fact Basil Spence, who won the competition to design the new cathedral which was launched in 1950, also designed a pavilion for the Festival of Britain.

It's quite possible that Coventry Cathedral might have ended up very different from today’s cathedral. The decision to rebuild the cathedral was taken very quickly, and the eminent Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was commissioned. His design, produced in c.1945, was very radical in terms of the interior, and probably not radical enough in terms of the exterior. The designs exhibited in the Royal Academy Exhibition certainly made it look a heavy and gloomy , sort of cleaned down and slightly streamlined gothic. Allegedly the bishop wasn’t happy, wanting a more modern looking building which would have a better chance of appealing to younger people. I have to be honest, looking at what we have now I can’t say that I think he was wrong.

Entering the cathedral I was struck by a number of things. Firstly, it’ a huge empty space, but on the other hand everywhere you look around the walls there are impressive works of art. I personally really like the massive glass screen with John Hutton’s engraved figures of saints and angels on each glass panel. I think that the figures are incredibly evocative, with their elongated necks and limbs, and their clothing resembling death shrouds, their strange, tormented, almost alien features. They’re not comfortable to look at, but my goodness, they’re effective. They’re also a hell of a contrast with Graham Sutherland’s gigantic Christ In Majesty tapestry, and also the panels of stained glass windows on either side. I’m not religious – not boasting, not apologising, just stating a fact – but if I lived close to the cathedral I could see myself often nipping in to spend a little time in quiet reflection – it really is that kind of space.

I like the clever way that the walls are built out in zigzagging ribs – stop me if I’m getting too technical here, and that they are broken up further by the stained glass panels. However, for me the real star turn on the exterior is the statue of St. Michael’s Victory over the Devil. It was one of the very last works created by Sir Jacob Epstein.I’ll be honest, I don’t unconditionally love every sculpture or statue that Sir Jacob produced. . . but I think that this one is fantastic. Hence the sketch. I did read that the devil’s head was allegedly partly based on Epstein himself, who had practiced expressions in a mirror. The head of the Devil is supposed to be modelled on his daughter’s two husbands – her first husband the artist Lucien Freud, and her second husband the economist Wynne Godley. It looks more like Godley than Freud but has resemblance to both of them in my opinion.

I liked Coventry Cathedral. In my opinion it’s one of those buildings where all of the hype you’ve heard or seen about it seems justified. Where cathedrals are concerned it’s probably true that you won’t get a true idea of how beloved, great or important they are for until they’ve been there for at least 100 years. It’s not impossible that I’ll be around in 2062, but not particularly likely. But I like it, and for the time being, that’s enough.