No.16 St Clement Eastcheap

Warm autumn sun, not so much on at the office, so the perfect chance to do a full 2 hours on St Clement Eastcheap. It's not actually on Eastcheap any more, after 19th Century road planners built King William Street, it has a narrow frontage onto the narrow Clements Lane, with a tiny passage down one side leading to a sad scrap of a sunless yard and that's it. So, by soulless office block packed with city boys staring at screens, I sat down and started to draw.

In the medieval city, the market on this side became known as Eastcheap, Westcheap eventually becoming Cheapside. Cheap evolved from the Old English 'ceapan' meaning to buy.

These narrow streets do seem to work well for this series - the last two or three have been similar in composition and I like the way I can make the foreground buildings focus attention onto the church. Also, I don't have to draw masses of detailed architecture which, whilst being a great challenge, it's very time consuming. This location had a city bollard in the foreground again!

St Clement's fame stems from the 'Oranges and Lemons' rhyme which is assumed to refer to the exotic fruit arriving at wharves nearby. After the great fire, Sir Chris rebuilt it after negotiating with the city authorities who took the chance to widen the lane, and as a result the church is 15 feet east of it's medieval footings. He started in 1683 and finished in 1687. Two parishes were combined after the fire, meaning the building's full name is The Church of St Clement Eastcheap with St Martin Orgar. I don't think Wren took too much time over St Clement: the church is a simple room with a short bell tower, shorn of any dramatic Wrenian flourishes.

Maybe its position, tightly packed into a group of buildings protected St Clement during the war, only the south aisle suffering bomb damage in the blitz.

The church has some medieval bread shelves on the south wall. These were used by parishioners to leave bread for the poor of the parish and date back to well before the great fire.

I sat and drew for the most part undisturbed, but a city boy on his ciggy break came over, professed admiration and asked if he could commission me. I declined.

Map here
Old version of the rhyme here

No15: St Michael Paternoster

I'm fated not to draw St Michael. Got down there on a beautiful day, only to discover I'd forgotten my ink. Couldn't find a shop selling bottles of ink. So I went and looked inside the church instead. Came back a couple of days later with a brand new folding stool and started well, but a call from work meant I had to put my pen down and get back to the office. And the stool broke. I'd hoped to get back and finish the drawing, but it's now September and I've lost the thread of the work.

St Michael has the Paternoster appendage because, as there were seven St Michaels in the city, it was named after Paternoster Lane, now College Lane, where traders sold Paternosters or Roseries. Sir Richard Whittington made some generous donations to the church and was buried in the yard. He has a great stained glass window of him, with cat, turning back to London on hearing the church bells and having his premonition that he would one day be Lord Mayor.  Over the centuries, he's been dug up a few times, the last team to look for him in the 1950s didn't find his lead coffin, but did find a mummified cat! St Michael is very proud of this connection, and looking around, I think Boris has some way to go before he achieves Dick Whittington's kind of immortality.

The medieval church was one of the last to be rebuilt after the great fire, being finished in 1694, nearly 30 years after the conflagration. Like many of these projects, the steeple was added later, completed in 1717. In the war, the church survived the Luftwaffe's bombs, only to be hit by a V1 in 1944. The walls and steeple remained mostly complete, services carried on in the shell and the church was finally restored in 1968.

Maybe one day I'll finish/redo this one.

Map here

No14 St Andrew by the Wardrobe

Given an early finish before the Jubilee holiday, I cycled down to Queen Victoria Street and found St Andrew perched up high above the road. Not an inspiring view, and it would have meant drawing next to a busy road. So I walked up St Andrew's Hill and found this tight view of the tower down an alley way. There was a nice spot to sit right outside the Cockpit, so with some trepidation I chose this aspect.

The unusual view really worked - I like the depth, good foreground/midground/distance. Having the Georgian houses and  Victorian shop (now a pub) so close to the church gave me a good subject for the series. Also, there were plenty of drinkers out in the street and they stood still long enough for me to include them. More bollards in the foreground - it feels like I'm doing a survey of the City's street furniture as much as drawing Wren's churches. I cheated the perspective slightly, by including the tight perspective on the back of the pub building.

St Andrew is by the wardrobe thanks to Edward lll. Apparently, he moved his state robes and other kit from the Tower to a building close to St Andrew. Named the Great Wardrobe, it was consumed by the 1666 fire along with St Andrew. However, the importance of the King's wardrobe is still reflected in street, building and church names. St Andrew is a plain building, with few of Wren's classical flourishes or creative architectural devices. But its red brick walls with ashlar quoins (I looked that up) are simple and elegant.

St Andrew was completely burned out in the blitz, leaving only Sir Christopher's walls and tower. It was restored in the late 50s and reopened in 1961.

Lots of Friday evening drinkers out celebrating the end of the week and the start of the Jubilee break, and loudly discussing share prices, office politics and the inevitable footy. They all left me alone, which was nice. I think the result is the best yet. I wasn't rushed, not having to get back to work, started at 5.10, set off to cycle home at 7.15.

More history here
A list of the 1638 parishioners and their rents and tythes here
Map here

No 13 St Mary Aldermary

Off to St Mary Aldermary in Watling Street. From St Paul's tube, you walk past the enormous mass of the cathedral's east end on one side and the enormous glass front of the One New Exchange shopping centre on the other. But turn the corner into Watling Street and you are back in the medieval street system, filled with city boys and girls hurrying to lunch past idling tourists, busy street traders, old pubs and shops.

St Mary sits just where she has for over 900 years. She is Aldermary because she is the oldest of the city St Marys, having been on this site since around 1100. The great fire of 1666 didn't completely destroy St Mary, leaving the base of the tower and some of the walls. The rebuild was overseen by John Oliver, one of Christopher Wren’s deputies, who was asked by the parishioners to follow the perpendicular style of the burnt building, using the original foundations.

St Mary is now the home of a group called Moot, a new-monastic community where those "who may not relate to traditional or contemporary expressions of church can find a spiritual path within the Christian contemplative tradition"

This St Mary is not easy to see from a good drawing distance. Because the building is squashed into a triangular site, the tower is on the south side and the nave is anything but rectangular, and it's hemmed in by blocks of offices and shops. It's easy to get up close, but I couldn't get far enough away to find a view that gave me the tower and the church. So, I chose the South East view which favoured the tall, elegant tower, sat on a chair unknowingly donated by the local O'Neill's and drew in the sunshine.

One and a half hours later I had the drawing at a point where I felt I could leave it and I just got back to work in time for a pressing meeting. I'm pleased with this - I like the thick, wobbly line, the proportions are about right and perspective works. I would have like to have time to draw in more action on the street - more people, traffic - but I like the couple on the left, who were having a lunchtime liason and stayed long enough for me to get them into the drawing.

Lots of comments as I was on a busy corner: accosted by a man handing out fliers who tried to persuade me I needed a second income. Two sharp suited young city boys went past, discussing why everyone was drawing: must be national drawing day, they speculated.

Wren's gothic here
Moot's history page here 
Map here

No. 12: St Margaret Lothbury

After weeks of rain, the sun beckoned me back to the city. No bike today, but St. Margaret Lothbury is nice and handy for the Central Line. From Bank I walked around the enormous pile of Portland stone that is the Bank of England, and found St Margaret round the back. There are only two views - down Lothbury looking east and down Lothbury looking west. The east view favoured the tower and gave me a nice corner under the Old Lady of Threadneedle's skirts, so I didn't waste any time, sat down and got on with it.

Margaret was a popular saint in medieval Europe and she had a following in London as early as 1200. The first church was completely rebuilt in 1440 but destroyed in the 1666 Great Fire. Wren rebuilt St Margaret from the ground up, completing his work in 1692 and Robert Hooke's tower was finished by 1700.
The great conflagration of 1940 burned out the church and now Wren's hand can only be seen in the shell of the building, the interior fittings coming from a variety of post-war sources.

I love this view of the church: it is not dwarfed by it's immediate neighbours and has the blank back wall of the Bank of England sitting over the road. It also has a clutch of steel and glass skyscrapers as a backdrop, including the Nat West tower. So, St Margaret Lothbury's setting perfectly illustrates the story of our medieval devotion to God replaced by our modern devotion to lucre.

Two hours exactly. Lots of interest including a man with a camera who asked if I wanted to be interviewed for his film about artists. I said I'd rather draw than talk about drawing, but that he should contact me later. We'll see if he does. Update: he didn't.

Map
More about St Margaret's rather dodgy history  here
John Stow’s A Survey of London from 1598: description of the church before the fire here

St Anne and St Agnes

No. 11

St Anne and St Agnes is on Gresham Street, just north of the Old Bailey and completely surrounded by banks in glossy, glassy offices. It has a neat garden and on the day I drew it a busy atmosphere. There was a lunchtime recital, organisers and audience buzzing about, city boys and down-and-outs mingling in the garden, lots of activity on the streets around the church. The church is now Lutheran and you can attend services in English, Latvian and Swahili.

St A&A has suffered from fire rather too many times, burning down in 1548, then in 1666 the Great Fire left nothing but the stump of the 14c tower. In the great burst of building activity that followed the fire, Wren, with the possible help of Robert Hooke, had it rebuilt by 1680. Wren designed a Greek cross plan for this small brick church, based on ideas seen in Dutch church architecture. Neither St Agnes nor St Anne could protect the church from the blitz on the night of 29th December 1940, which saw it bombed and burned again. Restoration was finally completed in 1966 thanks to a big contribution from the Lutherans.

There are a couple of views from the east and north-east, but no chance of seeing the church from the west - newer buildings press right up to the base of the tower and big metal gates prevent anyone from walking round the west and north sides. I liked the north east view because it includes Wren's 17C church, a mass of 20C buildings behind, and in front, the remains of the 2C Roman wall. So this drawing covers nearly 2000 years of London history in one sitting.

A sunny day in March was deceptively cold. I sat on the walkway wall, built as a viewing platform for the ancient remains. By half way through my hands were freezing and the line grew wobblier as the drawing progressed. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I quickly got a handle on the form of the church and enjoyed dealing with the mass of perspective problems that stemmed from the jumbled nature of the buildings. I like the boldness of the rail in the foreground, but wished the weather had allowed me to put more detail in the garden and background. The drawing doesn't feel busy enough either - needs more people.

One city type - a perfect caricature of a red-faced, upper-class banker - stopped to compliment me on my choice of subject. A gaggle of tourists viewing the Roman remains all took shy glances at my efforts. Pleased with result, glad to get out and do another drawing after such a long break.

Map