The London Underground is something I have loved since I was very young. Growing up in West London the Tube was what took me to interesting places. Now, I'm not totally shortsighted about it. I don't have to use the Tube since I haven't lived in London for more than thirty years. I've used underground railways in cities all across Europe, and in terms of getting the job done, I can agree that London is not the best. But for character, I've never found another system that can approach it. So I've decided to try to put some of my Underground pictures in the same place.
Paintings
Platforms and trains
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| City and South London Railway c. 1910 |
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| 1938 train at modern Southgate Station |
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c. 1940s
Stations |
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| Rayners Lane - this is one of my better station exterior watercolours. It shows off the typical Charles Holden 30s station architecture. |
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| Southfields - This is Charles Holden again, but in very different vein. This was an attempt at ink and watercolour. Note to self, when applying watercolour washes, check that the ink is waterproof before you start. |
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| Perivale. Painted about the same time as Rayners Lane. Not Charles Holden - |
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| Mornngton Crecent - direct watercolour. Issues with perspective spoil this one. |
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| A very early ink and watercolour. When I drew this in 2017 I was going to leave it as an ink sketch but decided to try my luck applying some colour. This is Maida Vale. It looks like Leslie Green's work, with the oxblood coloured tiles, butt is in fact the work of Stanley Heaps. |
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| Kilburn Park - Stanley Heaps again |
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| Hammersmith (Hammersmith and City Line) Not a bad picture, but not quite there with the perspective of the station |
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| I really like this one, but it's not because of the station. I like i because of the way I managed tto paint in the two buses. |
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Southgate again, although this was in the forties.
Pen and Ink
Trains and Platforms |
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| 2023- This is a type of electric locomotive which worked the early days of what became the Central line. This is worth comparing to earlier pen and ink sketches. The drawback of making such a heavily shaded sketch is that it takes hours - this one about four hours, others even longer. I do like the perspective on this one though. |
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| Steam engines, being more curvilinear are more difficult to draw accurately than electric or diesel. I'm quite pleased with this one, of an old Metropolitan Railway Steam engine pulling into the present day Baker Street. |
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Right, this one is a fair cop if you say that it isn't an underground line as such. Not quite. This is the Holborn Kingsway tram subway tunnel.
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In the earlier days of electric power on the Underground they tended to use locomotives rather than the multiple units that we know and love, which really came into their own in the 1930s. This is a Metropolitan Railway electric locomotive from about 1920
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| This one needs putting into context. During the covid lockdowns I set myself a project of making sketches of every London Underground Station. So much did I enjoy it that I extended it to include Overground Stations and the DLR. Only three of the DLR pictures focused on platform and train and you can see that they are nothing like as detailed as the previous four pictures. With these ones I was only going for an Urban sketcher type impression. |
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| This was the first DLR sketch that I ever drew. If I remember correctly this is West Silvertown station |
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Bank - one of very few DLR stations with Underground platforms.
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Stations
When I underwent my project of sketching all of the stations of the Underground, Overground and DLR I made the arbitrary ruling that unless they were completely different stations with the same name I would only draw each station once. There's still well over 200 of them. I'm not going to show all of them here, just enough to give you the flavour of the sketches. For the record I did redo some of the Underground Sketches to try to match the quality of he Overground and DLR drawings. The first three though are original Underground sketches
Cartoons and Caricatures
In 2023 I noticed that cartoons and very basic pen and wash tube pictures were selling quite well on ebay. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I produced this set of postcard sized ink and wash paintings, along with half a dozen or so others which seemed to do the business for me.
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