Introduction

I’m still getting used to London, though I’ve lived in it for almost seventy years, most of that time in the same street. A lot of it seems pretty much the same, the streets and houses, the canals and greenery and open spaces near my home, north of the river. But many aspects of the scenes and people beyond this local core are new, different and fascinating, and the city as it was when I first moved here has profoundly changed. The contrasts between how London looked then and how it is now are what this book is about. It’s in three parts, and gathers together drawings from across my lifetime in the city, from my earliest sketches to watercolours made less than a month ago. The first part is about the London I got to know as a student in the early fifties and then while earning my living as a young jobbing artist, the only job I’ve ever had. The second is about my studio, tucked away in a quiet and leafy street in North London, and the third about some of the places within easy walking distance of it.

The book is also about drawing, and what the process of drawing brings out of me. In his poem ‘Afterwards’, Thomas Hardy ends the first stanza with: ‘He was a man who used to notice such things’. I’ve come to feel that noticing things, looking more intently at them and understanding them better, is key to what drawing means. It has always made places more interesting, and made me feel more alive.

I grew up in Hertford, twenty miles north of the city – just near enough to see its red glow in the sky during the Blitz. My parents were Scottish painters who had moved down from Glasgow to find work, my mother as a weaver and my father as a poster designer. As a small boy I came to know about London because during the week my father stopped digging the garden or painting pictures of it and disappeared after breakfast, I supposed to do some more digging, but in reality to work in a design studio in Shell-Mex and BP’s tall new building off the Strand, which had a clock nicknamed Big Benzene.

My earliest trips to London were to see what he did there, but the first visit I can remember was when I was five, to see King George’s Silver Jubilee procession – a long boring wait, an endless line of people walking, the train journey home in a carriage full of exhausted policemen going home themselves. On later outings I went to the Zoo and to Primrose Hill where, strangely, there were no primroses. I went on going to London from time to time during the war: once just after it started to see a pantomime; once during a lull in the Blitz to stay for a week at the Dulwich house of one of the London evacuees who were billeted with us in Hertford; later on a school trip to see Hamlet in the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. I went once again at the end of the war, to Oxford Street, to see an exhibition about the German concentration camps. The pull of London, with its galleries and theatres and foreign films, was strong and I was drawn back again and again throughout my teenage years.

I first came to live in London as a student at the Royal College of Art, only five years after the war. The city was shabby and many of its bomb sites were uncleared, but some of Wren’s churches were still standing, as was Smith’s Wharf, a beautiful warehouse beside the Thames which I drew several times. During my first year I had dreary digs near Olympia in West Kensington, then moving to Battersea, nearer to the RCA studios, which were scattered across South Kensington. I’d started off in the graphic design school, having impatiently thought it was where I was likeliest to get in; then, after a year mainly of poster designing and typography, I changed to the illustration department. I grew to like working in its printing studio, where (extraordinary at that time) we were allowed to set metal type by hand and where I could print my wood engravings, and in the lithography studio, where I made my first prints. I also attended the painting school’s life-drawing classes, having always found drawing from a living model interesting – both for learning to understand how the human form fits round its skeleton, and to appreciate its proportions, and for really noticing the way people stand, their characters, attitudes and movement. Life classes are also self-revealing – one’s lack of skill can’t be passed off as mere self-expression.

I was lucky to be taught by extremely good tutors, though I was perhaps influenced as much by their work and their presence as by their advice, and spurred on more by the other students than by the staff. The graphic design school was run by Professor Richard Guyatt, and its part-time staff were a remarkable mix of people whose work I already knew and liked: Abram Games and Henri Henrion, the poster designers; Reynolds Stone, the wood engraver; Edward Ardizzone the illustrator; the painters and engravers John Nash and Edward Bawden. The last three had all been official War Artists, as had Bawden’s friend Eric Ravilious, whose wood engravings and watercolours I greatly admired, but who had been killed in the war. Bawden was the one I came to know best, and while a student I went several times to stay with his family in Great Bardfield, in Essex. The RCA also sometimes welcomed interesting and inspiring visiting outsiders like Barnett Freedman and Anthony Gross, lithographers and engravers, and Francis Bacon, who was for a while lent a studio in which to work on his screaming popes; he was said to have painted them with his bare forearm.

After I’d finished my course with an RCA diploma (not yet in those days called a degree) Richard Guyatt kept me on as a junior tutor for two extra years while encouraging me to take on any commissions that came my way. To begin with, these came via people my father knew or had worked with, like Jack Beddington, who had been his boss at Shell-Mex. Others came via my tutors, who passed on jobs they were too busy for or didn’t want to do themselves. I left the RCA in 1955, certain only that I didn’t want to commute or work in a design studio with anyone else, but most importantly (despite knowing from my father’s experience that freelancing was unpredictable and risky), hoping that I would somehow be able to earn my living on my own as an artist. I wanted only to stay afloat by drawing or painting, for whatever purpose and no matter how.

This book begins, as my working life did, with jobs for firms based in Mayfair or the West End or the City. Some of my earliest professional commissions were drawings, engravings and watercolours for press ads for tonic water and sugary drinks or vintners and brewers, big oil and chemical and pharmaceutical companies. Much later came ads for a du Pont insecticide, which turned out to blind some of the people who sprayed it. This task in particular made me think harder about what the commissions I took on were really responsible for. Even as a sixth-former I’d already begun to suspect that advertising was anti-social and parasitical. But the art directors I met were clever and helpful, it paid far better than most of my other jobs, and for the first few years it taught me a lot and helped to keep me going.

Luckily, back then and indeed throughout my career, one job led to another. I was commissioned to illustrate with wood engravings a short book called What About Wine, which led to more book illustrating, and drawings for newspapers and magazines and, unexpectedly, to postage stamps; the exposure these occasioned led to commissions for lithographs and screenprints, too. I also made a poster, Visitors’ London (page 25), which, along with my engravings and designs, led much later to a mural on the Underground. All these jobs were fun to do, fuelling my self-confidence, and they took me into printers’ workshops and publishers’ offices. Most importantly, they enabled me to discover new subjects in the city, sometimes in parts like the river that I already loved, but often in bits of London I hardly knew.

I painted watercolours of these new subjects, and gradually started to initiate more of my work myself. And when I married a fellow RCA student, we moved away from my tiny rented flat in Battersea. Between what I was earning and an unexpected legacy, there was just enough to buy a lease on a small converted coach-house in a then down-at-heel but quiet crescent in Camden Town. Here I had a studio of my own and I’ve lived and worked in the crescent (though not in the same house) ever since.

Camden Town has held my attention and interest throughout my working life: how it looks, how it’s changed, the places within walking distance and the people who live, work or simply flock here, all are fascinating to me. I love to draw the rackety streets with their remnants of historic social, commercial and industrial activity (there are three ex-piano factories only a few streets away); Nash’s terraces, the beautiful canal and the nearby parks, the roads and railways and, above all, the many different people, who more than anything else now make up Camden’s character (even if at weekends the pavements are as crowded as Venice’s with tourists). Over the years I’ve sketched the newly washed but still empty roads in the early morning; the afternoon visitors resting, picknicking or partying by the canal. On summer evenings, I enjoy sitting in the sun outside a pub watching the traffic and the passers-by, and I’ve always liked the wildlife: the seagulls on the pinnacle of Arlington House, the cormorants drying their outstretched wings on the roof of a canal barge. Once a heron flew too low and landed in our garden. Drawing even quick scribbles of these creatures fixes them in my mind.

Over time, the area has changed, tidied itself up and become gentrified, with new neighbours coming and going in the crescent. There are new high-rises and flats, buildings are better looked after; any usable spaces filled in, smaller shops and offices driven out by high rents. The canal is no longer a transporter of heavy goods; its links with the railways ceased as their discarded goods yards were sold off and redeveloped. An Edwardian theatre and music hall has vanished, leaving only its site, but another survives as a prosperous dance hall. There are more people and more traffic, and you can no longer buy real snakes and monkeys in Parkway – you have to make do with T-shirts with red buses and Union Jacks on them instead. The comfortable idea that hard and demeaning work has disappeared and that everyone’s got a job has gone. When I came to this part of London there were no beggars; there are now. Living and drawing here has gradually helped me to see the city as a whole, then and now, the good and the bad, the fascinating and the deplorable, the true and deceptive and the bits in between.

At the heart of this book is my studio, the tools of my work, and the joy of noticing, looking and drawing – the urge to single out from the complexity of the world around me something specific, and, in starting to draw or paint it, coming to look at it more carefully, to better understand its appearance, shape, proportions, colour, structure and character. At a time when abstraction in art is all the rage, representation is less fashionable. But it’s too interesting to write off. Drawing and painting can be stimulating, surprising, puzzling, incomprehensible, accessible, obvious, trite or boring. What is certain is that they both make one look harder, more intently and more analytically. So I’m still drawing, painting and noticing new things about this town, which I’ve known and loved almost all of my life.