Another couple of questions -

What Should I Draw?

Whatever the hell you like! This is supposed to be fun, remember! Most of us who love drawing aren’t trying to make a living from it. Yes, alright, a lot of my art is for sale, but I’ve made a lot more money from selling things that I wanted to draw and paint than I’ve ever done through commissions. Bearing that in mind then, I would break it down into:-

Draw things that reflect your interests

There’s a reason why the majority of sketches I’ve made so far in my new sketch book are related to railways, Victoriana/Edwardiana, London, architecture, and some fulfil several of these criteria. That’s because I find these things interesting, and if you find something interesting then you’re not going to mind spending time looking and drawing it.

Draw other artists’ work that you admire and which inspires you

There’s a lot of benefit to be gained from copying others’ work. In the last couple of years I started copying some of Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. I love Victorian engravings I general and Tenniel’s work in particular. This developed into a challenge to copy all of his illustrations for the Alice books and that in its turn led me to copying some of other artists’ later illustrations for the books. I wouldn’t necessarily say that copying Tenniel has made me sketch more like he did. However I feel I’ve learned a great deal about how he constructed these wonderful pieces of work, and its hugely increased my appreciation and understanding of his work.

Use prompts

When I undertook to make a drawing every day for 365 consecutive days, I found using the prompts from a Facebook group that I joined to be very helpful. Even if you don’t want to join a group, you could use Inktober prompts. Every October since 2009 the public have been challenged to make an ink drawing every day, post it somewhere someone else may see it (from social media to just sticking it on your own fridges.) Every year there’s a series of prompts for each day. You can google these. The challenge of sketching something which fits the prompt is a good one and well worth taking on, as it will lead to you drawing things you would otherwise never thought of drawing.

How long should I spend on a drawing?

On the surface this appears to be a ’how long is a piece of string?’ question. Thinking about it, though, it’s a fair question. I think I all depends on the reason why you’re making the drawing.

If you’re drawing in response to a prompt because you’re trying to make a sketch every day for a specific amount of time, then you’re limited in the amount of time you want to spend on it. There’s quite a few quick exercises you can do in a practice session to help build your skills. For example – pick a subject, then . . .

* Try to draw it in no more than three minutes. This is a good warm up exercise

* Try to draw it in one continuous line without lifting your pen/pencil from the page.

* Look at the picture for five minutes then try to draw it with your eyes closed.

* If you’re right handed then try drawing it for five minutes with your left hand and vice versa if you’re left handed.

The purpose of this sort of exercise isn’t to produce instant masterpieces but to loosen you up and get you focusing on the bare essentials. It’s fun too.

Where and what you’re drawing can limit how long you have to spend on a drawing too. I do as much urban sketching as I can, and to date I’ve made urban sketches in about 20 different countries. Sketching from life  plein air is for me the ultimate challenge. It’s at the same time the most challenging and also the most rewarding kind of sketching. I don’t tend to spend more than an hour on an urban sketch and this is necessary for a number of reasons. You’re out in public and this means that people who are sooner or later going to get in your way. If you’re out in the open then the light conditions are going to change the longer you spend on the sketch. I suffer from arthritis and sitting, or worse, standing for long periods becomes painful. Also there are places, for example metro station platforms, where it’s not a good idea to stay sketching for long periods of time.

I do sketch from photographs as well. This is a different challenge to urban sketching. For one thing the camera has already done a lot of the hard graft for you. The camera has translated a 3 dimensional subject into a 2 dimensional representation. When you sketch from life you have to do that yourself. There’s no imperative to sketch particularly quickly when you’re sketching at home ad I’ve been know to leave a sketch and finish it off later. As a rough rule of thumb I can do a very detailed sketch in no more than four hours, which is about how long I spent on the dustman picture.

Demonstration

 I thought that I would try to show more clearly how I make a sketch by starting with a anchor point and working outwards. So - here's the image that I chose to sketch:-

It shows a London dustman about 1900. A dustman is a refuse collector. They were first called dustmen in the UK because in Victorian times much of the household refuse they collected was ash and dust from coal fires. My great great grandfather, Walter William Manning was, I discovered a 'carman in vestry'. A carman could be anyone who used a horse drawn cart in the course of their daily business. However a carman in vestry specifically meant a corporation/ council dustman. Walter William died only about 10 years before this photograph was taken. He died from pneumonia at the tragically young age of 29, leaving several children, including my great grandmother behind.

So let's begin. It was pretty much a no-brainer for me to begin with the dustman climbing up the ladder with a bin. Being it's a figure, I started with the face, ad the eye on the left in the particular. If you see that as the anchor point then you'll see that I have worked outwards in all four directions. I have not marked out where the main parts of the sketch are going to fit - I trust myself that if I take care everything will gradually slot in.

Again I've spread in each direction, but particularly put in part of the rear of the wagon. I know that if I get this detail in proportion to the dustman, then I ca easily finish the rear of the cart as and when I'm ready. Likewise I have the top edge of the side of the cart there, which means I can sketch in the buildings in the background whenever I feel like it.

I made the decision to work to the left, and the key to this was completing the dustman figure, because almost everything further to the left could be defined by its relationship to the figure. Also putting the leg in gave me a reference against which I could start to sketch the ladder. In turn, once the ladder was there it would give me a reference to sketch the bottom of the cart and the wheel, when the time came.

Well, the time came a lot quicker than I thought. As I said, I am a very undisciplined sketcher, and to once I'd sketched in a fair bit of the ladder I couldn't resist drawing the cart wheel. These always provide me with issues, but this was one of my more successful attempts. It made sense then to sketch in the side of the car above the wheel. 

I worked to the left as I had originally intended. The combination of climbing dustman and ladder gave me a reference for drawing in the other dustmen to the left, and the buildings above them. I also extended the arc of the top of the cart's rear. It took a while to get this far but it was worthwhile because the sketch was already beginning to resemble the photograph.

I completed drawing and shading the men and buildings up to the left hand edge f the drawing. To be fair it had taken quite a while to get this far and so it made sense to me to call it a day. I hadn't started the sketch until yesterday evening and I was not going to finish it yesterday. 

When I returned to the sketch this afternoon it made sense to me to draw in the rear of the wagon, which would be a very useful reference for the background buildings. However it also made sense to work on the buildings behind the middle of the cart too. So I did both. I had also started drawing the left hand basket since I couldn't finish the underside of the cart until I'd drawn in this basket, nor complete the rear of the cart.

There's many a slip twixt cup and lip, but having drawn in and shaded the rear o the cart I was already feeling pleased with the way this drawing was turning out. If you look to the bottom left you can see that at this stage I decided to give the road surface some texture with small patches of asymmetric lines. On the right you can see the outline of the left hand basket, which I have to draw in so that the cart will be completed. 

With the cart itself now finished I wanted to draw in the brickwork and apply the shading to the buildings behind the cart. The right hand edge of the rear of the cart gave me the reference I needed to draw the doorway peeping out behind the cart. I judged where I wanted the right hand edge of the picture and then drew he lies of the kerb and pavement edges. This meant I could extend the texture marks on the roadway.

Almost finished now. Almost all of the outlines were in and the large bay window to the right was shaded too. All that was left was to add the steps leading up to the front door the brickwork and shading to the right, and a little more texture on the pavement.

And here's the finished drawing. I say it although I shouldn't, but I'm really pleased with this. If you compare it to the original photo, it's a pretty faithful rendition. I've really enjoyed sharing with you how I constructed this drawing. as you can see, there's no magic to it - precious little method, come to that. 

How do I Do It?

I sometimes post on a Facebook group. Since the start of this year I’ve been mostly posting the ink drawings I’ve made in my new sketchbook. I’ve had some lovely comments and also a number of questions. So bearing this in mind I thought I’d share some with some of the answers I’ve given across a number of posts. So let’s begin with this question -

How do you do it?

Yes, a lot of people want to know what the secret is of being able to make such detailed ink sketches. Well, basically because my technique is all wrong.

I’ll do my best to explain that.

I’ve been drawing and sketching for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid I would often make pencil sketches copying pictures out of my comic books, for example. Line drawings for the most part. One day I took a book out of the library all about how to become a better sketcher. To say I was disappointed was an understatement. If you’ve ever read such a book I think you’ll know the sort of thing it was advocating – draw very faint basic shapes and boxes, gradually add the detail and make darker lines, etc. Yes, here’s more to it than that. Now that I’m older, a little wiser and a lot less judgmental I can see that this approach makes perfect sense and if you have little confidence and your hand-eye coordination is not that well developed then this is surely a good framework to help you develop. For one thing it would have meant I would have got better at placing the overall picture on the page a lot more quickly than I actually did. However, at the time I felt it was a lot of potch. I just wanted to get on with drawing what I saw.

You see my hand-eye coordination was already sufficiently well developed. I take no credit for this since as far as I can tell I was born with it, but I’ve always been able to judge distances between lines on a page, and between different features of a picture. I am still in some ways a very undisciplined sketcher. There’s no telling where I will start to make a drawing – well, on the paper, obviously, but not where on the paper. With faces it’s different because I always start with the eyes. I believe that if you get the eyes right your picture will eventually look like the subject. You can change other details, and even small mistakes won’t matter too much. If you don’t get the eyes right then it won’t look like the subject. Of course, when I was younger this did sometimes mean that the face would be too far to the left of the paper. With other subjects though I might start anywhere. While I might begin on the details on the far left and work rightwards, or on the far right and work leftwards, or in the centre and work outwards. Basically I find what I think of as an anchor point before I start. So in portraits you could say that the left eye is always the anchor point. I can’t tell you why I don’t start with the right eye, other that it just didn’t feel right the couple of times that I tried. If you look at these recent sketches I’ve marked the anchor points on them. These are where I made the first marks on the paper and as you can see, they’re all over the place.

When I start I never try to think about the whole thing. Instead I think of what I’m working on as a series of small pictures that relate with each other which makes up the big picture. When I’m on song I don’t even see it as small pictures but as individual lines that relate to each other on the page with my concern being to be true to this relationship in the way that I draw the lines.

A wonderful man called Tony Hart fronted a long running TV series for children called Take Hart, all about making your own art and I remember in one of the very earliest shows he demonstrated the importance of areas of shade in portraiture. I took that on board and I’m sure that my work improved a lot. I applied this not just when drawing people, but when drawing anything. Shading with pencil or charcoal is in some ways easier than with ink since you can vary the tone with a little less pressure or a little more pressure on the pencil. When I started drawing with ink I had to experiment with hatching and cross hatching to begin to get a feel for how to achieve the level of gradation that I wanted.

I feel that I’m fortunate that I know how to look at things I want to draw. Yes, of course I see the whole picture, or scene at first before I pick up the pen, but then I focus on small parts, which I try to reproduce on the paper. It requires some patience and also some confidence in yourself. It can take a long time before your drawing starts to resemble the subject and you have to have confidence that you’re doing well and if you keep going the picture will begin to emerge.

Which raises another point. Practice. I developed the confidence I mentioned through practice, which in my case meant just drawing, drawing, drawing. I can’t stress this enough. Keep drawing. 6 years ago I set myself the challenge of drawing something every day for a year. I started in March so in reality the challenge was to make a drawing every day for 365 consecutive days. Amongst the more challenging aspects were finding the time for a sketch every day and also selecting exactly what I wanted to draw. Making the drawing itself was often the easiest bit!

I’m going to summarise. If you’re kind enough to say that you like my ink drawings and you’d like to be able to sketch like me, the this is what I can tell you.

Your eye is just as important as your hand. If you want to sketch like I do the you have to see the relationships between small parts of the picture you will be drawing. Anyone can make a mark on a page. If you can make a mark you can draw a line. If you can draw a line you can draw two lines or more. That’s not the issue. The issue is getting the relationship between two lines accurately. Have you got the distance between them right? The different directions of the lines? Should one be thicker than the other? If you make a point of asking yourself these questions it will become something that you do automatically.

I start every sketch with an anchor point. This is the small feature of my subject that I am going to draw first. I work outwards from this point always looking to see what relationship the next mark that I make should have with the previous mark that I made.

As I work outwards I keep looking at my subject and noting areas of shade, and how they compare in terms of tone with other areas of shade. With careful use of hatching and cross hatching I try to get the appropriate level of tone for what I’m looking at. For example, the wider the space between the hatching lines the lighter the shading you’ll get and vice versa.

Concentrate on the small pictures that make up the big picture and the big picture will take care of itself.

Cast a critical eye over what you produce but be kind to yourself as well. Yes, if you think something didn’t work somewhere then it’s useful to ask why it didn’t work as well as you wanted. But it’s also very useful to spend some time looking at what you did well too. Just because you did something well once there’s no guarantee it will just happen next time. If you know how you did it and make a conscious effort to reproduce it next time, you’re more likely to succeed.

Keep sketching. That’s the best advice. Just keep sketching.

Sketchbook Continued

 Only four since my last post. They are -

Oyster Seller

You know, today we tend to think of oysters as a delicacy you might order in a fancy restaurant. They're certainly not an everyday food of the poor. Yet if you were to go back to Victoria/Edwardian times, that's exactly what they were. Oysters were cheaper than red meat and the railways meant that they could be transported in huge numbers to the rapidly expanding cities. This depicts a street seller.

Post man and van collection c. 1920

Royal mail vans are still a common sight throughout the UK. Not vans like this one though. The very first Royal Mail vehicle was a converted steam traction engine. Along with many other British institutions, the Royal Mail's use of motorised vehicles greatly increased in the period between the two world wars.

Street Violinist

I was drawn to this scene, even though it is modern compared with most of the other drawings in the new sketchbook. The violinist seems to be playing i frot of a museum or a public gallery.

Puffing Billy

Yes, back to railways again. This is Puffing Billy and it is the world's oldest surviving steam Locomotive. The world's first ever steam locomotive was Richard Trevithick's Penydarren locomotive of 1804. This was made ten years later for Wylam Colliery in Northumberland, to haul wagons to the docks. It's sister locomotive, Wylam Dilly, was made just after and is actually the world's second oldest surviving steam locomotive. By modern standards Billy and Dilly were inefficient, but they worked for over forty years, and certainly influenced another Northumberland colliery engineer called George Stephenson, who was building his own first colliery locomotives at the same time as Wylam Colliery chief engineer William Hedley. In 1856 Billy was put on display in the London Patent Office, which later became The Science Museum, where it can be seen today. Dilly is on display in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Puffing Billy may possibly be where the phrase, going like Billy-o is derived from.

Latest Sketchbook Drawings.

 Barry Island Woodhams Bros. Scrapyard c. 1980

In the 1960s British Railways decided to move to purely diesel and electric locomotives and units. Its locomotives and tank engines were sold to scrapyards across Britain. By the mid 70s the scrapyards had cut up their stock – apart from one scrapyard in South Wales. Woodhams Brothers Scrapyard in Barry Island, South Wales, made the decision to cut up a large consignment of coal wagons first. Word got round and by the mid 70s the scrapyard had become a mecca for steam engine enthusiasts, and in 1976 my family joined their number when we made an excursion from London.

On a practical level there were almost 300 locomotives and tank engines in Woodhams. 213 of them were sold to various preservation societies and restored to run on heritage railways. The last left the yard in the 90s, but in its heyday in the 70s the scrapyard attracted visitors from all over the world.

Kew Gardens Pagoda

Kew, in South West London, is home to the Royal Botanical Gardens. One of it great oddities is a chinese style pagoda, which rises majestically into the skyline. During the 18th century, what became the Gardens was the site of a royal palace. It was built in 1762 by the Royal architect William Chambers, who designed several other chinese style buildings for the park, a reflection of the fad for all things oriental that we call the chinoiserie style, which later found its most extravagant expression in the Prince Regent's Royal Pavilion at Brighton.

The Old Lighthouse - Smeaton's Pier in St. Ives

Lighthouses are structures that I've always liked.

London to Brighton Veteran Car Run

Come rain or shine, on the first weekend of November owners of veteran and vintage cars gather in London and take part in the annual car rally to Brighton. The iconic shot is always of the cars going across Westminster Bridge.

Street Beggar in Ostend, c. 1900

Victoria Station, London 

Queen Victoria might possibly the historical figure who has had the greatest number of cities, states, countries, towns and other places named after her. Victoria station opened in 1860, although the style of locomotives in the photograph I used for reference suggests that this is at least 20 years later. 

Final sketchbook Drawings before back to work

Okay, I don’t know how long I am going to be able to keep making at least one new sketch in my sketchbook every day since I’m back to work tomorrow. I have show before that I can keep up making some kind of sketch every day for a whole year before, back between March 2017 and March 2018. Still, some of those were rather ropey, the kind of thing you can dash off in 30 minutes or so or the very good reason that many of them were dashed off in 30 minutes or less. But I only want to make quality sketches in this book, or at least sketches of the best quality I can make. So, here’s fifteen to eighteen.

Michelangelo’s statue of Moses. 

I once saw Charlton Heston in an interview saying that he had been told a story about his casting in C.B.Demille’s The Ten Commandments. He reckoned that someone told Demille that the face of Michelangelo’s statue looked like Charlton Heston. Demille is supposed to have drawn a beard on a Heston publicity photo, and this sealed the deal. In medieval and renaissance iconography Moses is often depicted in art with horns on his head. There are several plausible explanations. Some art historians point to the ancient Middle Eastern tradition of depicting their gods with horns as a symbol of power. Some take a linguistic approach and point out similarities between Hebrew words for horned and shining.

Galapagos Giant Tortoises

I’d love giant tortoises even if they hadn’t helped Charles Darwin formulate the theory of evolution by Natural Selection. Darwin was intrigued by why species on one island would have longer necks than those on another. Although having said that it was his studies of the differences between the beaks of different species of Galapagos finches that really set Darwin thinking. Coming back to giant tortoises, these come in at number 2 on my list of favourite (living) reptiles. Top of the list is the Komodo Dragon, third is the saltwater crocodile, fourth is the King Cobra, and honorable fifth is the Tuatara.

Replica of the Gotheburg passing beneath Tower Bridge.

This is based on a photograph from 2007, although the ship came back to London and did it again in 2022. The Gotheburg is a replica of an 19^th century trading vessel belonging to the Swedish East India Company. It is currently the world’s largest wooden ocean-going sailing ship. The original ship was launched in 1738, and ran aground on the return from a successful voyage to China just 6 years later. By the time that Tower Bridge opened in 1894 the great age of sail might have already passed, but its double bascule design was made specifically to accommodate the masts of tall sailing ships entering or leaving the Pool of London. Prior to the opening of Tower Bridge.

Fighting Stags

I was reading Barry Hearn’s autobiography, and I was struck by a passage in which he described staying on a large estate in Scotland, and turning down the chance to shoot a stag, much to the disgust of the ghillie who had prepared the shotgun. I’m with Barry on this one.

- and first sketches of 2024

Being as I’m still on holiday from my day job as a teacher until Monday I’ve been continuing to use my sketchbook, making at least 1 drawing a day. Here’s the latest:-

Yes, it’s another based on a Victorian/Edwardian photo. Or rather, a photo trying to look like it was from those times. Looking at the quality of the original photo I think that these may well be re-enactors, but what the hell, they’ve captured the scene pretty much spot on as far as I can see it. Mary Poppins has a lot to answer for when it comes to chimney sweeps. It was a great film, with wonderful songs and state of the art (at the time) sequences that married live action and animation, but it romanticised what was a pretty bleak and unrewarding occupation.

This one I drew in response to a prompt on Facebook’s Sketching Every Day – Happy New Year for cats. I don’t always follow the prompts when I contribute, and even when I do follow the prompts I’ll sometimes look for an alternative take on the prompt. So this is based on an exhibit in the world famous La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, showing Smilodon, aka the Sabretooth Cat. When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s Smilodon was usually called the Sabretooth Tiger, but that’s gone out of fashion for the not unreasonable reason that it’s not a species of tiger, or of any other modern big cat either. Smilodon has always been one of my favourite extinct mammals – for the record it’s up there with Megatherium (Giant Ground Sloth), Woolly Mammoth and Indricothere (gigantic hornless rhinoceros far bigger than a modern African Elephant). Hey, it’s my blog and I can pick what I like.

I wanted to draw a bird of prey. I’ve always had a liking for owls, and would have picked this species, the Eurasian Eagle-owl, for its latin name Bubo Bubo if nothing else. But I really like its Dennis Healey-esque eyebrows. (There will now be a short break for UK readers to go and ask their grandparents who Dennis Healey was) The scanner just would not do the whole picture in one go, hence the photograph as well.

The latest returns to machinery, and formula 1 grand prix cars. There were Grand Prix motor races long before there was a formula 1 world championship. That didn’t begin until 1950, and the reference photo on which this one is based was taken during a pit stop in the very first grand prix of that very first season, which took place at Silverstone in the UK – yay!

Last sketches of 2023

Happy New Year! Okay. Christmas Day was 1 week ago. I had many presents – the star of which was a city break in Bucharest coming up in February. Yay. One of the others though was a hardback sketchbook , landscape format, from my oldest daughter and my oldest grandson. The paper isn’t quite as good to work with as the card I’ve been using for the last few months, but there’s something I really like about it. As a result I’ve been trying to do a least one drawing every day in it – starting on Christmas Day I’ve managed ten of them. Here they are:-

Old London Underground Aldwych Station. No reason why this station specifically, although it’s now a station that is no longer used for passengers and hasn’t been since the mid 90s. If you follow the blog at all then you’ll know that I love depicting the Tube, and particularly from years gone by.

Rhino. Again, there’s no personal reason for this, other than I was looking for something completely different from the previous picture. I’d considered painting a rhinoceros in acrylic and even started it just before lockdown in the much missed Artist’s Group sessions. I like rhinos as well although I absolutely would not like to get onto the wrong side of one. It’s just not right that something so big should be able to run faster than we can.

Last summer immediately after the June 30x30 challenge I got into painting a series of direct watercolours based on Victorian photos of workers – chimney sweep – fishwife – street performer etc. I fancied doing some ink sketches of similar subjects, and that’s how I came to do the third picture. The original reference photo of miners walking down to the put entrance is portrait, but my book is too bulky to turn round and use portrait style while I’m sitting on the sofa in the living room, hence it takes up relatively little of the page. I really like the original photo though.

Just over 20 years ago while staying with my mum and stepdad in Tottenham I fulfilled an ambition to see Temple Bar in Theobald’s Park. Temple Bar is a ceremonial gateway to the City of London. It was probably designed by Sir Chrisopher Wren. I say probably because there is no contemporary document which clearly says Wren designed it. However Wren’s son did own the original plans for it, which is pretty strong evidence, I’d say.

Temple Bar stood in the Strand in London. When the Royal Courts of Justice were built it needed to be removed, and to be honest it had been too small to cope with the volume of traffic it the Strand by the middle of the 19^th century. Showing remarkable foresight though the City of London authorities insisted that it should be taken down carefully, brick by brick, rather than being knocked to pieces. Each block was numbered, so that it could be rebuilt in another location. Which is exactly wha happened. Within ten years of it’s being dismantled in the 1870s it was bought by Lady Meux, the wife of a brewing magnate and rebuilt in their estate of Theobald’s Park in Hertfordshire. She added two handsome lodges either side of the gate, which were built in sympathetic architectural style and added to the grandeur of the building in its new setting.

In the second half of the 20^th century there was a growing movement to bring Temple Bar back to London. I first learned about it when I was quite a young child – already in love with London and its great buildings – and then later from a book on notable British follies. I made up my mind that I would one day visit it in Theobald’s Park.

I only just made it. We visited on a Sunday in July 2003. By this time the money had been raised to purchase Temple Bar, dismantle it, then re-erect it in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London. Work actually began the day after our visit. Of course it wasn’t possible to put it back on the spot in the Strand where it had stood, and so the decision was made to place it at the entrance to Paternoster Square. I didn’t get to see it in its new position until the summer of 2004, although my stepfather managed to go to the Opening Ceremony. When I did see it, though, I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. For all the fact that it had been run down and dilapidated in Theobald’s Park, it had a kind of grandeur about it. In its current position it is dwarfed by the cathedral and the buildings opposite, and its position just off Fleet Street makes it look like an afterthought.

I’ve drawn it a couple of times before. I painted a copy of an 18^th century painting of it to give to my stepfather, which was one of the first acrylic paintings I ever made. I see it every time I visit since it’s hanging on their living room wall. I’m a little embarrassed when I see it because I can’t help thinking about how I could do it differently – better – now. It’s a subject I keep coming back to. This particular sketch is based on a photo taken just before the demolition. I believe that the hoardings on the right were where the Courts were being built, which means that we’re looking westwards.

The next two sketches also reflect my love of old London but particularly focus on my love of public transport. Now there’s a subject I keep returning to. I do love a metro, or subway, or Underground railway. If pushed I will admit that my first concern about a city break destination is always – does it have a metro system and does it have trams? Bucharest, the next destination has both incidentally. This picture number five shows an old entrance to Paddington Underground Station. I rather liked the old taxis.

I have had rather a thing about trams for a long time, although I never got to ride on one properly until 2017 when I visited Prague. In the first three decades of the 20^th century London had one of the most extensive tram networks in the world, although the 1933 creation of the London Passenger Transport Board saw the decision to remove trams from the capital. World War II meant that South London did keep its trams until the start of the fifties. Before the introduction of electrified trams there were the horse drawn trams. These had begun running on rails in London in 1870. Horse drawn omnibuses had been running in London since George Shillibeer’s first omnibus in 1829, two years after he had started a pioneering service in Paris.

By the time that the first horse drawn tram ran in London in 1870, the Metropolitan Railway had been running under (slightly) London’s streets for 7 years. The 7^th sketch is based on a reference photograph showing a recreation of the early days of the Underground. My surname family only moved to London in the 1930’s – my Grandad Clark moved from Dundee during the Great Depression – but some of my mother’s ancestors were in London from at least the early 19^th century. I can’t prove that any of them ever used the Underground in its first decades, but I’d like to think so. My mother’s mother always said that her father had worked on the building of an Underground Line. He was a pipe and joint maker and so my educated guess is that he might have worked on the District Railway extension in the first years of the 20^th century.

There’s very much a family connection with the 8^th and 9^th drawings. The 8^th shows a porter in the Covent Garden Fruit and Veg. market in about 1900. Covent Garden was one of the great markets of London along with Billingsgate Fish Market and Smithfield Livestock market. One of my great great grandfathers was a man called Walter William Manning. He didn’t work in Covent Garden but was a Carman in Vestry in Hammersmith – what we would call a corporation dustman. The poor man died of pneumonia when he was 29. His father, John Manning, was a whitesmith, that is someone who made things like post, pans, cooking utensils etc. Now, his father, James Manning, was a Covent Garden porter. He was married in about 1850 in the famous St. Clement Danes Church. In the 1851 census there are quite a few Mannings working as porters in Covent Garden, at least some of whom might have been closer and more distant cousins.

The market was unsustainable in the centre of London, with its narrow streets, and moved to a site in Nine Elms south of the River in the early 70s. Ironically the main building now houses the London Transport Museum. Just under ten years later Billingsgate moved to Poplar to the East. Smithfield, the oldest, still remains.

 

So, as much as I have a thing about London, and about public transport, and about Family History, I also have a thing about bridges. Bridges of London, even more so. Such a thing is Hammersmith Bridge, subject of sketch number 9. What’s more is that it also has a rather macabre place in my family history. The Bridge in the sketch is the current Hammersmith Bridge. It was designed by the great Sir Joseph Bazalgette and erected in the 1880s. The previous bridge on the site was the first suspension bridge across the Thames. It was designed by William Tierney Clark and opened in 1827. The bridge was very similar to William Tierney Clark’s own 1837 Chain Bridge across the Danube in Budapest – which is still standing and I enjoyed walking across in 2017.

Tierney Clark couldn’t have envisaged how the volume of traffic that the bridge would carry would exponentially increase over the next few decades. The authorities at the time were appalled at the possibility of the bridge collapsing when the annual crowd of over twelve thousand people gathered on the bridge to watch the University Boat Race and rushed from one side to the other as the Oxford and Cambridge boats passed beneath. It’s always struck me as ironic just how important the boat race was to people of Hammersmith and the surrounding area, and how whole families would be passionate supporters of one of the two universities. Despite the fact that there was sod all chance of any of these families’ kids ever getting to either seat of learning, this kind of partisanship was still very common when my parents were kids in the forties and fifties.

Coming back to the bridge, it was during the 1860s when my ancestor John Olive was walking across the bridge to work that he had a fatal hear attack. Even more macabrely his son, James, would have a fatal heart attack while walking 20 years later – this happened on the South Ealing Road. Both had inquests carried out in the venerable Dove Public House in Hammersmith.

Number 10, my last sketch of 2023, shows a pair of London street performers with a ‘barrel’ organ. Mind you, there seems to be less of the barrel and more of the upright piano about this one. In fact it should more properly be called a ‘street organ’. The reference photo I used, judging by the fashions, looks to have been taken in the late Victorian or Edwardian period, one side or the other of the turn of the century. It looks a bit unusual to us today, but you have to remember that ‘free’ public entertainment in the form of the radio was some decades in the future, and the phonograph a luxury that relatively few could afford.

Mind you, this kind of street performance was still not that uncommon by the time that the BBC started broadcasting the world’s first TV service in 1936. Still, it had always been looked down upon as a form of begging, and indeed Charles Dickens who loved the popular theatre condemned it as a public nuisance. After the second World War it practically died out as anything more than a historical novelty.

Having said that though, I do have a very hazy memory of seeing one in the Uxbridge Road in West Ealing in what would have been the late sixties. But in all honesty it was so long ago I’m not sure if it isn’t my memory playing tricks on me, and I’m getting it mixed up with something I saw in an old film or TV show.