Hill
Primrose Hill isn’t big enough to be seen or even much noticed from far away, and it’s not especially dramatic to look at even when you’re strolling up it. But the closer you get to the top, the more impressive and steeper it seems, and from its summit you realize what’s wonderful about it – the views are spectacular, the best there are in London.
In winter, its bare trees reveal the tastefully pretty pastel-coloured stucco villas that edge the hill; in early summer, the lush long grass conceals people sitting and lying on the upper slopes, and you can only see their heads and shoulders. On sunlit autumn days, as the trees lose their leaves, the hill turns golden brown; it is bleak but brisk again in winter, and occasionally there is a snowfall – an annual certainty in my earlier years here, but now a brief but much-loved surprise.
My first childhood memory of the hill was that there were no primroses, and there still aren’t. But there are pleasant paths, pretty lamp-posts, lovely trees, plenty of space, people and dogs, and except on Bonfire Night and New Year’s Eve it doesn’t shut at night. Over the years I’ve often drawn it because it’s nearby, always beautiful and different, and has the clearest views of the distant City and West End, forever changing and transforming; but also maybe because I’m continually changing too in the way I look and think. All these things make it my favourite place.
Primrose Hill’s shops and cafés on Regent’s Park Road are smarter and more individual, leisurely and upmarket, the crowds sparser and the people a notch less cosmopolitan than in Camden Town itself.
In winter, before you begin to climb the hill, the asphalt paths pass through fresh-looking but occasionally quite squelchy parkland.
The hill is lovely in early spring. The nearer you get to the top, the less you notice the surroundings, most of which are now behind you anyway. Sometimes, even on the first warm weekday in April, the trees are still bare and there are few people about.
From the summit, Canary Wharf, the City and the West End are spread out before you, bristling up on the skyline, with St Paul’s passing in and out of sight as you walk across the top. I drew this view seated on one of the benches, the other visitors’ groupings, attitudes, opinions and conversations becoming part of the experience.
I’d long watched from the hilltop as BT’s tower gradually rose. It was then the only tall high-rise on the horizon. The autumnal lithograph on the left was commissioned by BT in 1981 to celebrate the company’s independence from Royal Mail (by then the tower was no longer being called the Post Office Tower). On the right is roughly the same view as it looks now in spring.
This was my first wood engraving of the hill, when there was still a proper gas lamp on the summit. The engraving here includes my younger children some years later. Both engravings were made in the warmth of the studio as Christmas cards. Snow makes everything else look black anyway, which is convenient for wood engraving, a medium which tends to make me simplify and formalise my subjects. In the first, the tranquil figures are at a safe distance beyond the hawthorns. In the second, they’ve become the main subject and it’s the skyline, then surprisingly empty-looking, that’s far away, like their childhood.
