Skaters at the Natural History Museum

London's Urban Sketchers group met at the Natural History Museum last weekend. The conversations and support from the people who go is always more important to me than the actual act of drawing on the day. I spent a bit of time outside the museum drawing people having a good time on the ice rink, and I offer that page from my sketchbook to you here with whatever season's greeting is appropriate to you. Here's to 2020.

There's more information about London's Urban Sketchers here, and you can see more of my drawings on Instagram.

From London Calling to Never Mind the Bollocks

I’d passed the unassuming church hall behind this church in Highbury New Park around the corner from where we live hundreds of times before I found out that it was, from the 1960s to 2003, a recording studio once owned by George Martin. Here, as the Wessex Studios, the Clash recorded the London Calling album, and the Sex Pistols recorded Never Mind the Bollocks.

As if that wasn’t enough, Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix, the Specials, Nick Cave, Queen, Madonna, Bjork, the Three Degrees, Elton John, Kylie, the Rolling Stones and many more worked there. The building has now been split up into residential apartments, imaginatively named The Recording Studio.

The writer Douglas Adams lived for a while in a flat in the house immediately next to the church.