Happy New Year and London memories

The first post of a new year, the first completed image of my new year!

A house in Texas, with family and pets (past and present), that was commissioned just before Christmas and my trip back to Chichester and London.

Seems a long time ago, already.

The beauty of dumping myself on my daughters is that they move around London so much. I was born in Paddington, but brought up south of the river. I never really was very au fait with the other side. Thanks to them I have found myself north-west, north and east so far.

 

This time Whitechapel, Ripper territory. Loved it. A few yards from the Bell Foundry (the oldest still in business business in Britain - since the fifteenth century) which is in a wonderful little row of dilapidated Georgian buildings with real live Georgian shops, bow fronted windows on the pavement. All empty, neglected and unoccupied and all the more romantic for it.

I love the unexpectedness and living history of London, the way as we hurried to catch the tube one morning I happened to look to the right and saw a blue plaque commemorating the fact that on that spot Isaac Rosenberg had lived, then stumbling upon Captain Bligh's house across the river, stepping into Benjamin Franklin's bare bones of an eighteenth century house near Trafalgar Square, passing by Virginia Woolf's home in Bloomsbury (you may have noticed I have a thing about houses  ....). And reacquainting myself with Keats House, of course. With the excuse (if one were needed) of delivering some cards.

 

So here I am, back in the bananas and fiddling with some sketches, some dried mulberry leaves from the original tree outside Brown's parlour window and a stash of autumnal coloured cuttings ... I feel a new Wentworth Place picture coming on ...