Return to Winchester

Read an introduction to my drawing journey around England, which started 30 years ago.

[Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.] 

So I reach Winchester, which the guide books will tell you is a beautiful city stocked up with no end of history, how it used to be the capital city and one of the most important cities in Europe. But I haven't looked forward to it. I lived in Winchester for three years when I was at art school so I am well used to a dreary respectability that lurks beneath the surface. It is a city that spends the evening watching Terry and June repeats or is tucked up in bed by nine in the evening with the Daily Telegraph crossword.

[In retrospect, I seem a bit tough on Winchester here. It’s probably moved on a bit since then.]

But I arrive on different terms today, to stay a couple of nights and see it from what I hope to be a better perspective. There is no denying it is a beautiful place once you escape the one-way system that loops around the centre with its share shops and wine bars. I leave the van by the park and walk in.

It is a gentle and restrained city but rather like someone who has outgrown their clothes; it is more like a town with the historical trappings of a city. The cathedral sits like a ship run aground, left high and dry as the city's importance as one time capital of England has ebbed about it.

Winchester is probably still recovering. Although there are Iron Age settlements nearby, it was developed by the Romans who laid out a grid system of streets and built its defensive wall. By the seventh century the Saxons had founded its first cathedral and St Swithun became its most famous bishop. King Alfred came here to live and made it his capital. And from then until the 12th century Winchester swung. Edward the Confessor was crowned here, William the Conqueror rebuilt the royal palace and the Domesday Book was written here. Thanks to records written at the time more is known about Winchester than any other city in the Middle Ages. It was stuffed full of traders from all over Europe, densely populated for its time, the second largest town in England.

You can get a sense that it hasn't all been downhill since from a walk down its High Street (top image). The shops are smart and expensive. Where there are gaps, shoppers can see through windows in the hoardings to where teams of archaeologists are sifting through remains before builders and concrete take over.

Winchester survived its loss of power and wealth to London, the Black Death (that left it with fields and orchards within the city walls), and the Civil War. Later the coming of the railway helped revitalise it: what had once been the nation's centre had become little more than a market town until the trains arrived. And it saves it still, in a sense. An hour from Waterloo on the train, it is the perfect retreat for people working in the City and wanting to escape to a home in peace and tranquility. Winchester is not a playground; the only cinema has been demolished to make way for more housing for the elderly.

A bearded man with a rucksack accosts me for money so he can get a bus to his family in Southampton. It becomes a familiar story. He greets me cheerfully later when I bump into him in a cafe. He seems wonderfully out of place here and tells me which bench by the cathedral an old lady goes to sit to offer her services as a self-appointed sexologist. At times it seems like nobody more than stockbrokers and retired wing-commanders live here so it is a relief to see this hint of a more quirky side of life.

James Hobbs, Cheyney Court, Winchester, 1990

The cathedral's spireless tower gives it an incomplete look and yet it still manages to dominate the skyline. Its first tower fell down in 1107. Having one of the longest naves in the country, it effectively cuts the city in two, keeping Winchester College and the water meadows apart from the rest of the town. In the summer the Cathedral Close livens up as people strip off to eat their sandwiches around the gravestones. Today they are taking cover by the west door, waiting for a shower to end on their way back from communion.

A walk down the south transept can be a disorientating experience as arches lean and the tiled floor undulates. Suddenly it is an uphill walk. The trouble is caused by the flood plain on which it was built, the River Itchen having rotted the wooden foundations to such an extent that in places nothing is either horizontal or vertical. By the lady chapel is a statue of William Walker, the man who worked underwater to secure the foundations at the beginning of the [20th] century, showing him in full diving gear, his hands outstretched, palms up.

What have also survived in a less than perfect state are the bones of an array of Saxon kings perched in boxes along the top of the side screens. Each contains a haphazard cocktail of regal remains now, their contents having been scattered around by Cromwell's troops on one of his visits. We can only assume that one king's bones look pretty much like another's and they were swept back into these boxes as they were found. Further along the aisle is a memorial to Jane Austen who came to live in Winchester to be close to her doctor. Sadly it wasn't close enough and she died soon after in a house nearby.

The streets in the afternoon become busier with the boys from the college going with their parents for tea, couples ambling down the pedestrianised High Street window shopping, walking off the Sunday lunch. Even the few punks Winchester has to offer seem as respectable as the city expects. Some sit with their dog around the Butter Cross, which stands awkwardly close to a bakery with a traffic cone perched high on one of its spires.

James Hobbs, Butter Cross, Winchester, 1990

A walk down by the water meadows is a popular thing to do on a Sunday afternoon. Homesick little boys in suits are taking awkward strolls with parents past the cricket pitches, and happier-looking, scruffier boys peer into the river from bridges looking for trout. The meadows are remarkably unspoiled despite being so near to the city centre. A dual-carriageway snakes around the foot of St Catherine's Hill, the footpath to its summit passing beneath it. It's a steep climb that leaves me puffing. At its top there is a maze, the old Iron Age fort, and a wonderful view over the city.

For a city that has experienced such turmoil and fervour down its historic past, Winchester has earned a breather now. Those who still like to think of England as being a gentle, sleepy place brimming with royalty and history could only find it delightful. I'm just glad I don't have to live here anymore. To me it is a place that time has left behind, not somewhere I would want to live, but perfect for a day out as a retreat from a truer more real world. 

The next day, having camped in a pull-in high up in the fields out of the city, fields famed for their corn circles that will no doubt appear later in the summer, and among the stacked and numbered trunks of trees sliced down by the hurricane in 1987, I set out for the church of St Cross. Down a lane towards the water meadows and through an arched gateway there is a large quadrangle bordered by the houses of the men who live at the Hospital of St Cross. It was founded in 1136 to house 13 poor men and provide free dinners for 100 others, and a few of its present inhabitants are sitting on benches in the sun looking towards the church. Besides the three rooms that make up their quarters, there are the old kitchen, a dining room and a hall adjoining the gatehouse.

James Hobbs, St Cross, Winchester, 1990

The church is beautifully proportioned and simple, and built at a time when Norman was (my guide book tells me) becoming Early English. Its quiet expanses of stone, wood and glass accentuate corners of activity. “Bird Beak Window” a sign says. Above it is the carved zig-zag arch and 500-year-old glass.

Along the back pew the May edition of the parish magazine has been sorted into piles fastened with elastic bands; Mrs Giles - 5, Miss Stanwyck - 9, and the visitors book left open. There is the mystifying nationality column, and then a comments section.

Parents married here in 1912.

Peaceful.

Norman? (This sounds like an attempt to communicate with the dead.)

Damp!

Kick out the darkness and let the light bleed in.

There is, as Morton would have said, a book to be written about the comments made in church visitors books.

The Wayfarers' Dole, the bread and ale handed out to travellers who demand it from the gatehouse, does not show the same unchanging qualities as the Hospital. Seven hundred years of generosity has resulted in a corner of a white Mothers' Pride loaf and a token sample from a plastic bottle of Webster's Yorkshire Bitter, both served with badly worn charity. A man serves it with the resigned air of one who has been through this a thousand times.

In Morton's time there was always a steady stream of wanderers stopping here for refreshment, the vagrancy laws keeping the homeless on the move between towns. Now the homeless are more static in city doorways or wandering the streets asking for change, and rarely seen on the grass verges of main roads. Tourists who have read Morton's book are the ones most likely to ask for it now, the porter tells me.

Taking the wooden platter and small earthenware goblet to a bench in the sun I can only hope they have not come too far for this. The hungry are better off heading straight to the pub on the corner by the main road where a more satisfying lunch can be found.

James Hobbs, 1990

Read on: Romsey, Hampshire, and Southampton docks

See more of my drawings on Instagram.

New York City sketchbook

We had a celebratory family holiday in New York City a few months ago. Coronavirus was in the news of course, but was yet to really hit either the US or the UK, where we flew from. Less than a month after we returned home, both New York and London were in lockdown.

Our stay there was almost completely untouched by the disastrous events that were to come: there was hand-sanitiser in our hotel lobby, but we crowded into museums, squares, the subway, bars and restaurants, and face masks were a rarity.

These are the drawings from my New York City A5 sketchbook 2020, a snapshot of a city so soon before it largely closed down and life changed. I've spared you the pages of diary entries that intersperse the drawings. We feel lucky to have managed to visit when we did, and send our love to a city that we remember fondly in these tough times.

Lower East Side, seventh floor looking east

Delancey and Allen Streets, New York City

Breakfast at Russ & Daughters, Orchard Street

Lower East Side rooftops

Manhattan from Brooklyn Bridge Park I

Manhattan from Brooklyn Bridge Park II

Delancey Street subway

From the Empire State Building looking north(ish)

From the Empire State Building looking north-east

MacDougal Street cafe, Manhattan

The new Essex Market, Lower East Side

Central Park skyline

Katz's deli, crammed

Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, and a bridge

Washington Square, New York City

Three bridges: Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg

Remedy Diner, East Houston Street

Lower East Side from floor 14 (an added page)

Room 514 in the Museum of Modern Art: Man Ray's
Chess Set (1920-26), Brancusi's Blond Negress II
(1933) and Tarsila do Amaral's The Moon (1928).
And a window with a view

I'm on Instagram.

Bucklebury, Combe Gibbet and the RAC

James Hobbs, Bucklebury, Berkshire, 1990

Read an introduction to my drawing journey around England, which started 30 years ago. 

[Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.] 

The first night out. I have ducked off the A4 down a narrow road that, by the speed they are going, is well known by the commuters rushing home. I get the idea that the van and I are a rude intrusion into their well-ordered lives, getting under their feet. I dawdle along in the same direction, trying to find the village of Bucklebury: it is spread thinly through the lanes, and I never know quite if or when I have found it.

In looking for places to camp each night I am going to avoid the camp sites whenever I can and knock on peoples' doors to see if they can direct me to some quiet corner, and at least give England's reticent population the chance to say something to me and save money into the bargain. I have driven miles searching for the right sort of place when I come across a large white house at the end of an intimidating gravel drive that I select as my first target for somewhere to stay.

The door flies open to reveal a man in plus-fours and a mobile phone hanging from a belt like a revolver. A lean, elderly, military looking man, barks over to me, "What can I do for you m'boy?" in a colonial sort of way. I tell him what I'm doing and how I am looking for somewhere I can pull in for the night, words I was to repeat hundreds of times over the months.

"Morton! Aha, of course! My father had a bookshelf full! Never did get around to reading any myself."

But he leads me to a small gate down one side of the garden, which goes into a narrow field where I can stop for the night. He leads me past firewood stacked against a hedge to show me where I can park. The pile, he says, has not gone down over the past mild winter - "but it's a dreadful frost valley down here. Down to minus ten last week."

Expressing surprise here was a mistake on my part, and he jumped as if he'd caught me out.

"Towny! You're a towny! Only a towny wouldn't know it's been so bad!"

The sky is ominously clear, and I feel I am about to find it out tonight.

I heat a tin of soup and then follow the footpath that leads through the field to a horse-smelling criss-cross of tracks behind the hedges. There is a leafy wood that muffles the footsteps and every other sound, the acoustics of the English jungle.

But it isn't as silent as it seems. Over the birdsong is the white noise of the M4 and a ceaseless rumble of Heathrow traffic, two inescapable links with another pace of life. Coming back out of the fields as darkness falls I pass a line of bungalows that look over to the woods and click, click, click, their security lights come on one by one.

James Hobbs, Bucklebury Church, 1990

In the morning, my host is up in time to chat with me while the toast burns, painting a vivid picture of the whole of the south of England being overrun with deer, stripping trees of their bark as they go. He's really got it in for me now.

"If you'd been up at a decent time this morning, your..." he points at the van, struggling for the right word, "thing would have been surrounded by them. No education!" he concludes.

I offer him a cup of tea, but he has, after all, not yet concluded, and turned instead to his views on letting the starving of the third world die out naturally rather than being "mollycoddled" by the likes of "us". "Thinning out" he called it.

He waves me off, and I think he will miss me being around to shout at. I stop to draw in a gateway on the way to Bucklebury Church, listening to a cuckoo somewhere across the valley while a stack of pornographic magazines blow around the road. The church is hemmed in between the rectory and post office, now The Old Rectory and The Old Post Office. This is ideal commuting country, encouraged by all those country living articles in the colour supplements. The migration of rich and poor between city and country continues. It seems quite possible though that one day there will be no such thing as a "local".

*****

Even if you are driving around the lanes of Berkshire looking for a gibbet on a hill, it still comes as something of a surprise when you finally come across it. And today probably more so, as, chugging up the hill towards Combe Gibbet, I can make out the unmistakable form of a figure hanging from it.

James Hobbs, Combe Gibbet, Berkshire, 1990

From the twinkling lights reflected from car windows parked on the hill on this hazy warming morning, there is evidently a crowd out to see it. I have never considered myself an ambulance chaser but there is an allure to this macabre sight, and one I can't resist.

Getting closer, leaving the car park and its drowsy occupants with their BBC Radio 3 and vacuum flasks, I can see they are not concerned with the gibbet at all but giving their attention to group of grounded hang-gliders in the next field.

"'Not enough wind, just not enough,"' a helmeted man is saying. He turns to the little group and just for a moment I get the idea he's going to ask us all to blow.

The limp legs hanging from the huge T-shaped gibbet are way out of reach, but a soft stuffing is still visible oozing from one of the trouser-legs. The jacket is packed so tight that the few buttons that are left are popping off. The head is of stuffed sacking. It droops weightily, the noose giving it that same jerked angle you see in old black and white photographs from the hanging heydays.

On the opposite arm of the T, a sign has been hooked, awkwardly written, weathered and calling for good neck muscles and eyesight.

I am a farm worker who earns £120 a week. My rent is £30 a week, food for my wife and I is £60 a week. This leaves me £30 a week for clothes, transport, furniture and all the other things in life. I cannot afford a holiday. How can I afford £4 a week for our poll tax. This is the only way out. Please help to change this unfair system.

[The poll tax or, as the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher insisted on calling it, community charge, was a flat-rate tax that fell disproportionately on the poor. Her insistence on its implementation helped bring her down later in 1990. I came across a few other poll tax demonstrations on the tour.]

As a site for such a protest, you had to hand it to him. How can you resist such an apparition visible across half of Berkshire? The gallow's uses are now certainly few, but the farm nearby is obliged to maintain it in the condition it was in when it was erected to hang two child murderers in the 17th century, the only time it was used. There are signs of recent repair, new wood and metal plates to show it is still observed, and a steady supply of walkers over the hills to stand and watch.

James Hobbs, From Inkpen Beacon, 1990

It is a small point, and one no doubt lost on those about to have the noose about their necks, but there can be few finer views from any gallows. There is a massive expanse of countryside laid out below us, almost totally still except for flocks of birds and a tractor gradually working left to right across a field perhaps a couple of miles away. There are two palls of smoke, one very black, the other blue and emerging vertically from woodland. Several patches of oil seed rape stab yellowness into receding diamond-shaped fields.

The air moves a little, enough to set a body rocking on a gibbet, but still not enough for the hang-gliders.
 
*****

The second night out, and I'm feeling pretty good having parked up a long, disused lane, waking to silence from the fields around, silence even from the skies, but then too silence from the engine, which splutters but does not start. And so my second morning out brings my first appeal to the RAC. With the help of a farm labourer who was happened to be spraying a field nearby we pushed the van to within sight of the road and I set out to look for a phone. [Mobiles were a rarity in 1990.]

There are few more uplifting sights than an RAC roadside recovery van coming around the corner and one I was to find did not diminish with frequency. A man jumps out with a precise moustache slicked into place. He is the nearest thing to Salvador Dalí I have seen. He fiddles with the spark plugs, and I have to turn the engine over from time to time as they are tested.

"And again." It is like a doctor asking me to say "aaah".

"The compressor," he announces. I am still dreading that this may mean the whole journey is over before it has hardly started, when he asks for £1.50 for a replacement. A rummage through my pockets only brings to light £1.24 in assorted change, which he accepts.

As I'm pulling away, he calls to me, words I cannot quite make out. They may well have been: "See you again!"

James Hobbs, 1990

Next: Winchester. Read about it here.

[See more of my drawings on Instagram.] 

Buying, waiting, setting out: Heathrow

James Hobbs, A40, West out London, 1990

Read an introduction to my journey, which started 30 years ago today, here. 

[Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.]

It is hard to know quite where London ends now. Even when you think you have finally escaped it, reminders sneak through. It seeps undetected well past the outer membrane of the M25 into towns beyond, its influence unmistakable. The skies are hardly ever silent to the sounds of aircraft nor the fields to some dual-carriageway or another. Heading west, the greener expanses are undeveloped plots rather than pasture, a padding of cotton wool around Heathrow. 

Everything is built for speed and everyone is straining for more. "We can be out of London in an hour," people say, not mentioning the dangers this entails, the jumped lights, the rubber burned into the tarmac. At 50mph, I am the slowest. Black taxis rush to the airport, and business people bored with travel sit reading in the back seat. The City and Heathrow are London to them. Holding onto my shaking steering wheel I want to catch their eye and laugh.

I pass beneath a gridlocked M25, queues of sales reps held ransom so they have to rearrange appointments on their carphones, lorry drivers leafing through tabloids snatched from their dashboards. A scrap metal yard of stacked rusted cars in the shadow of the motorway is just another lost irony.

Suddenly I'm not quite sure why I am doing this. After all the delays it is a surprise to find myself on the road. The van is perhaps something of a joke, a pocket dormobile that often squeezes smiles out of people when they see it. A Volkswagen would be more serious, proof of a greater dedication to a nomadic lifestyle. This little 1972 Fiat, for all the wonders of Italian design, is not exciting or glamorous. It has the aerodynamics of a brick. Signs of rust are reappearing already through the recently sprayed white paint. The man who sold it to me from his home in the shadow of the Hinkley Point Power Station had smiled too much perhaps as we agreed a price.

"The wife and I were going to have our summer holidays in it," he had said, "but – but we've different plans now." He didn't expand on this and I didn't dare ask. It looked to me that he'd bought it cheap, had done it up and was selling it quickly to some mug at a profit.

Good for six months (nearly): the Fiat 850T

I took a friend along to check it over before I bought it. Chris claims to know Something About Engines and so I watched him slide underneath it with a grimace while I kicked the tyres purposefully and checked that the gas rings worked.

Inside there are a hundred bolted flaps hiding storage spaces, a table that emerges from the kitchen to make it a dining room from which unfolds a mattress to turn it to a bedroom. The roof unbuckles and concertinas up in a red and white striped canvas so it is nearly but not quite possible to stand up straight. From the roof a strange uncomfortable hammock comes out, a precarious pretence of a second bed. A tap pumps water up from a plastic container stowed away in a cupboard. Brown curtains with poppers seal the inside from the outside world.

The "kitchen"

Before Chris has wriggled back out from underneath I know it's exactly what I want. It didn't really matter what he was going to say.

"Hey, this is it," I tell him. "I'll offer him £850."

"James," he goes, "let me take you home now at great speed because this machine here can only be a source of sweet anguish and possibly eternal misery for whoever owns it."

I consider it. "OK, OK. I'll try £825."

It's true: later, there are problems. It will need a new water pump, not an easy thing to find for this model. In the weeks I wait for one to arrive, I practice packing in everything I need to take and then take it all out again, much to the amusement of the neighbours. I try a few short runs to camp overnight in the hills on the Welsh side of the Severn Bridge. The bed seems unnecessarily fiddly to assemble and takes up all the space inside the van once it is up. It needs to be made and unmade while still in it, a skill not easily acquired. The whole operation seems so time consuming I wonder if it's even worth my while going away.

It is the middle of April [1990]. I have the van booked for a service at a little local garage before I set out. I have given up on waiting for the water pump. The old one will last a little longer before it completely disintegrates. People have started saying to me "Haven't you gone yet?" each time I see them. The service goes reasonably well but before I can leave it needs a new brake light switch. They say this will be quicker to get than the water pump, but may be several days before it arrives from Warrington.

My late brother Dave: it looks like he knew what he was doing, and he probably did

Then I get flu, and spend days lying on the sofa wishing for an early death. [Thirty years on I did again, Covid-19, and wished for nothing more than a long life.] By this time a few people are even beginning to ask if I'm back already. The boxes are packed in my room waiting to be loaded in to the van at a moment's notice, and I start to eat the food I've packed into shoeboxes to take on the trip. There is a photograph of Hadrian's Wall in the paper one of these days. Right then, I couldn't envisage reaching London, let alone that remote outpost.

But then, and it's odd just how much of a surprise it comes as considering how long I've been waiting and expecting it, news comes from the garage that the switch has arrived and they can fit it straight away. Immediately I feel fit and well and ready to go.

I have a pile of sketchbooks and pencils, Morton's book and a road atlas. I have packed the provisions of a round-the-world yachtsman. I have a Shell Guide to England that can help me distinguish between what comes from the 13th century and what from the 14th century, but should the van collapse tomorrow it will all be over. On a budget of £40 a week there isn't too much scope for disaster.

James Hobbs, Datchet roundabout, 1990

The faster we can travel the further London spreads. Through Windsor where a crowd is gathered around the lights of a film crew shooting outside the castle, and Datchet where the green embossed with mini-roundabouts is overlooked by estate agents and antique dealers. The churchyard is shady and calm, and a woman passes by on her wicker-basketed bicycle as I draw, but the planes still rumble away and we may as well still be in London.

James Hobbs, 1990


Next: Bucklebury, Combe Gibbet and the RAC

Following Morton: the 1990 introduction

This is the original 1990 introduction to the story of my van trip around England with sketchbooks and pencils. Find out more about it here.

[Bracketed sections are comments added in 2020.]

It was at a car-boot sale near Winchester School of Art one Sunday morning in 1989 that I first came upon a battered paperback edition of HV Morton's In Search of England. First published in 1927, it tells the idiosyncratic story of a man's looping journey around England in his bull-nosed Morris. Once I had it in my hands, the temptation to flick through its pages to find his reactions to places I knew was irresistible.

It is a book that has hardly been out of print since. Morton blended an informal, humorous style with an interest with history that brought the country's past within reach of anyone who wanted it. The growing popularity of the motor car was making the towns and countryside more accessible to the public than ever before. Within 14 years it was into its 27th edition.

Morton had an aim, one that his readers evidently shared with him, and that was to "find" England. He knew what he wanted and he set out to discover it. His journey was loaded with many of the views you may expect from a gentleman's tour in the time of the Empire, so much so that by the last page he is able to turn to a country parson and pompously tell him, "You have England."

[Pomposity was the least of Morton's many failings: you can find a bookful more in Michael Bartholomew's 2004 biography of him, titled In Search of HV Morton.]

But flicking through this paperback more than 60 years later, I wasn't so sure what the bombs and bulldozers had left to be found today. I had an idea that the "heritage industry" would have packaged much of what he had described into neat bundles of visitor centres, gift shops and theme parks set against a rising tide of satellite dishes and out of town shopping centres. But before I knew it, I had bought a small camper van, loaded it with pencils and sketchbooks and had a summer of drawing stretching out before me.

As it turned out, almost everywhere had its surprises. It came as a shock to find some places exactly as he had described them, just as it was to find others so changed. But it was those unlikely events that popped up out of nowhere down country lanes looking for somewhere to park overnight that I enjoyed most, the people ready to invite you into their homes or help push the van. They were the things you could never plan. The English people don'’t seem nearly as wary of strangers as we are led to believe.

But it made me aware, too, of just how much colour and history there is a short drive up the least likely roads. We rush to the international airports with only the haziest idea of what is just over the hedge. What is closest to home is so often what is most overlooked.

James Hobbs, Bridge Street Rows, Chester, 1990.

We are regularly spoon-fed the heritage trail hype, shepherded about as if we are incapable of original thought, depriving us of any sense of discovery. Perhaps that is the natural conclusion of what Morton was encouraging in his book. But if you have the time to slow down and stay off the motorways and dual-carriageways and see what you can find, there are many more rewards. England is a compact island and it never fails to respond to the slow, patient search.

With that in mind it was at times frustrating restricting myself to follow Morton's route. We were hardly ideal travelling companions. There were times when I would have happily thrown his book out of the van window and struck out on my own way. There were roads off his tracks that I found impossible not to take, and few were disappointing when I did.

Ultimately, however, I remained faithful to Morton and his book and I suppose I'm glad of that. Had I not remained faithful I would probably still be out there somewhere even now, driving the lanes looking for somewhere to camp or, more likely, waiting yet again for the RAC man to arrive.

James Hobbs, 1990

Next: Buying, waiting, setting out: Heathrow

 

Thirty years on: the van revisited

Thirty years ago, in early 1990, I bought a camper van, packed it with homemade sketchbooks and pencils and, funded by £40 a week from Margaret Thatcher's enterprise allowance scheme, set off around the country for six months retracing the route of an old travel book I'd found in a car boot sale: HV Morton's In Search of England. Once home, I wrote about my experience, exhibited drawings completed on the trip, found a literary agent, and saw a parade of the UK's top publishers politely turn it down.

What since? While most of the 900 drawings have been kept safely in cardboard boxes and occasionally shared online (a selection of them were exhibited at Wolseley Fine Arts, London, in 1996), the 50 chapters have been archived in a series of devices that tell a story of technology since that time. The book was started on a typewriter, completed on an Amstrad and stored on floppy disks, and then passed through a succession of Apple Macs to laptops, the cloud and hard drives, and now to this blog. Over the coming months, to mark the 30 years since I started the journey, I'll be posting chapters from it along with the drawings.

Ludlow's Boots

An admission: these chapters were written and the drawings were done by a man half my age, and the person I am now would do things differently. My story has been given a gentle edit, but I have resisted changing things too much. It represents where I was during those six months. There are parts I wince at, but they survive.

Morton has fared even worse over time. The truth about the hugely popular travel writer, who died in South Africa in 1979, was revealed in Michael Bartholomew's In Search of HV Morton, published in 2004. The way Morton portrayed himself in his books was a carefully constructed work of fiction. There were plenty of warning signs about his character that I became aware of as I followed his route, but I hadn't expected to him to turn out to be the racist, adulterous, hypocritical Nazi-sympathiser that Bartholomew's book reveals him to have been. But, ugly as we can now recognise Morton as being, that too has become part of the story of my journey.

My drawings, only some of which are included in these posts, were done at a formative time of my artistic career. Although I had just come through four years of art education at Hastings College of Arts and Technology and Winchester School of Art, those six months of constant drawing around England saw my work evolve almost beyond recognition. Again, I have kept in some of those early, clunking images, because they too are part of the real  story.

My trip in the van was delayed for a while because of its hideous unreliability and, particularly, a faulty water pump. The date I started my journey, 24 April 1990, was noteworthy in a couple of ways. On that very day, at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched on its own long-term mission to send back to Earth images from the corners of the cosmos, a role it is expected to continue until at least 2030. With humbler technology and a more terrestrial focus, my Fiat 850T camper van trip also started sending back a series of images, except these were images drawn in pencil and from such other-worldly locations as fields near Hereford, front gardens in Bradford-on-Avon and lorry parks in Lincoln.

Read on: Following Morton: the 1990 introduction

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• The second – and more personally significant – way that the date of my launch around England is worth remembering is that ten years later to that very day, 24 April 2000, my elder brother Dave died of cancer. I have a photo of him with his head under the bonnet of the van that I'll post if I can ever find it.

A visit to the Sketchbook Project, Brooklyn

A library dedicated to sketchbooks? We had a family visit to New York recently during which I finally had a chance to visit a place that I've heard a lot about over the years. The Brooklyn Art Library is home to the Sketchbook Project, which consists of more than 40,000 sketchbooks from around the world, submitted by whoever buys a book from the project and then sends it in.

The library, located down an unassuming road just a short L or G train ride away from Manhattan, is in a bookshelf-lined space behind a shopfront. You could almost mistake it for a shop at first, in fact: there's a counter and tables of merchandise, and then, as your eyes adjust to the light, the receding shelves of sketchbooks come into view.

The sketchbooks used for the project are small – 5x7in and 32 pages – and not so space consuming, but because of their lack of a spine they are mostly anonymous when on the shelf. This isn't a place to pick books off the shelf at will and browse at length. The process for handling the books requires placing a request by doing a catalogue search on the provided tablets or on your smartphone through artist's name, subject, locations or tags – or randomly. Within a few minutes, or seconds even, the book is delivered to you by the librarian. (The book's creator even gets a message to say it has been accessed.)

The reasons for this system are obvious, but it can have the effect of stifling the best of serendipity that working your way through a physical shelfload of books would allow. And the search for items is only as good as the metadata. The books are also not curated, so of widely variable standard. This could perhaps be considered an advantage rather than a disadvantage. One of the project's founders, Steven Peterman, told the New Yorker that one of the reasons for setting it up was to subvert the traditional exploitative gallery culture: "We wanted to create a community anti-gallery space that was inclusive of everyone that wanted to be a part of it." But on my own visit I never felt I cracked the search system in such a way that I found a rich seam of exciting work. Some preparation with regards to what I wanted to see on my visit would have been a good idea.

Participants can, for a fee, also have their books digitised, so opening them up to a much wider audience – you can check them out here. Seeing the books online is not the same as holding them in your hands (I'm turning into a cracked record), but it's an accessible route in, wherever you are. A mobile library in the form of a three-wheeled bookmobile (which is parked in the corner of the library) takes examples of the collected books beyond the library's confines on occasions, and there have been tours of the books in the past.

Not everyone is keen on the idea of buying a sketchbook and giving it back to the people they have bought it from (the book becomes theirs while the copyright to your sketchbook's contents remains yours). The project has very recently become non-profit, which will bring new things such as more education programmes, but it is still a good idea to check the small print before participating, which includes:

1. 1.2. License to Content. By providing Content through the Services, you thereby grant The Sketchbook Project a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sub-licensable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform such Content in connection with the Services and The Sketchbook Project’s (and its successors' and affiliates') business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Services (and derivative works thereof) in any merchandise or media formats and through any merchandising or media channels...

This may seem like a reasonable price to pay (beyond the financial one) to have your work in this unique sketchbook environment. Here I should admit that several years ago I bought a sketchbook from the project fully intending to submit it, but I never have. It languishes in a drawer next to the desk among a pile of old art materials. The librarian told me it was not too late to finish it and send it in. Maybe I still will.

Brooklyn Art Library is at 28 Frost Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211, USA. It's worth a visit.

Pictures at an exhibition

There are times while visiting an exhibition when the temptation to draw what is on display becomes too great. As well as making me look at works much more closely than perhaps I would otherwise, drawing exhibits in the sketchbook is a way of taking some of the experience home, an experience that can perhaps dissipate too quickly otherwise. Sifting through my books I realise that I have quite a few of this kind of drawing, although some are inevitably more successful than others.

This was brought into stark relief when we visited the Bridget Riley show at the Hayward Gallery recently: her clinical lines and optical effects and my organic ink swipes don't really work well together. My drawing of her massive Composition with Circles 4, 2004 (above), for instance, lost everything of her original rhythmical arrangement, resembling little more than an array of cack-handed circular tea cup stains, but the process of making it made me look closely at her work's structure – or at least a part of it. It's a process that makes you ask questions about a work, spend time with it, and stops the eye just gliding past. Sometimes it's about more than just the drawing.

I've included some other drawings of works I've encountered at recent exhibitions:

Phyllida Barlow's untitled: blocksonstilts, 2018-19 at the Royal Academy in May 2019 (top image),

Cornelia Parker's Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) at the Royal Academy's courtyard in November 2018,

and Kader Attia's Untitled (Ghardaïa), 2009 (above), and Monica Sosnowska's Pavilion, 2016 (below), both at Tate Modern's Living Cities display in January 2020.

There are more of my drawings on Instagram.

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.