Before I flew back to the States, a couple more sketches of Burnt Oak, the hometown. After all the sketches from France and Belgium I needed a couple of drawings from up the Watling to be getting on with. I’ve had a lot of Burnt Oakers get in touch over the years, people who have moved away, sometimes pretty far (like I did), to say they like my drawings of the old manor, the place is a shared memory, and one that is always changing. I stood at the top of Watling Avenue and looked downhill. Those chimneystacks stepping downwards towards the station are iconic to me. I drew the other side of the street looking downwards way back in 2008, and then again looking upwards back in 2012, a decade ago. This time I added colour, and also a lot more of the people that passed by, because it was quite busy. We are a very multicultural area. The Romanian foodshop across the street (Food 4 Less) is where Pennywise used to be (I drew that in 2013), and next door you can make out a place called Bella. When I was growing up Bella, which was run by an Indian family if I remember, was a place where you could get all sorts of stuff. Household products, kitchen items, cleaning gear, cups (I have that mug that says “I’m a Mug from Burnt Oak” which comes from Bella), batteries, toys, you would come here to get your keys cut, oh and it was also a video rental store, this is where I would come with my uncle on a Saturday morning to pick out what films we would watch at his flat that afternoon. It seems that it’s just a cafe now. There is a clothes shop just out of view to the right that is called ‘Respect Men’, but has prominently displayed in the window what can can only be described as the illegitimate offspring of a tuxedo and a cardigan, white on the top half and black on the bottom, divided by an ugly carpet pattern going across the middle. Respect Men. I should have drawn it. Instead, I walked down the hill to the corner of Orange Hill, outside the library, and drew Woodcraft Hall. I’ve never been in there (never really wanted to either), but it’s one of those buildings I’ve known all my life that is just there, and long may it be just there. This crossroads was pretty much junction number one in my life. I lived up one arm of it, Orange Hill. Up Gervase Road, my mate Terry lived, and it was the way to Montrose and then on to Asda, where I had my first proper job (but not my first work). Left up the Watling towards Woodcroft Avenue, that was the way to my junior school, and on the corner opposite Woodcroft Hall is our local doctor’s, where my mum works. And then right is up Watling Avenue itself, you have the library, the shops, and of course the tube station which for me was the key to going everywhere else in the world, which I couldn’t wait to do. It started raining as I was drawing this, though I was sheltered in the doorway of the library, but I went home for dinner, and coloured it in later.

Back again. The view from my old bedroom in Norwich Walk, in our little Burnt Oak corner of London, drawn after waking up very early on a hot July day. On these days when I’m jetlagged and the middle-of-summer sun comes up way way earlier in London than in California (where the sun has a nice lie-in but definitely works a lot harder during the day), I like to try and start the day with a sketch, especially if I’m probably not going to be sketching as much due to doing family things. I miss seeing my London family, it’s always nice to be back, even at times when things are a bit stressful, it makes me feel nice to be Home, you know. I was lucky as a kid that we never moved house during my childhood, because it means I have definite sense of where ‘Home’ is in my mind. There are times even here in Davis in my forties that I wake up and I’m not immediately sure if I’m in my old bedroom or in California, with the window behind me, the shelf to my left, cars starting outside, a cat pawing at the door. Burnt Oak is quite different to Davis though. This is looking westwards, towards Orange Hill Road. Lot of stories up this street. I remember that house on the corner which has the little green food truck parked on the drive now, that was Mrs. Philpin’s house for a very long time (she passed away many years back), my mum was friends with her daughter since they were little girls, I went to school with her grandkids. I don’t know many other people in the street now, so many have moved on, passed away, although my old neighbour Matthew still lives across the road and I always stop and have a chat in the street when I’m back, usually about Spurs. This was an awkward looking sketch; the way the bed and side table gets in the way makes it harder to lean out the window than it used to be, although my mum now has much nicer windows installed. The morning sunlight kept changing the colours of everything subtly, but it’s pretty much how it felt; this was soon going to be the hottest summer of all time in London, and this day was going in that direction. My son had been up since about 3 or 4 as well, so we got a very early start and after breakfast with my mum we headed into central London for some sightseeing, taking our jetlagged selves onto a two-hour boat trip down the Thames, before getting the tube back up to Burnt Oak. We were still shattered from the two-day journey from California, but happy to be in London again. 

We each managed one sketch while down in central London, a quick drawing of Horseguards (below). 

Still in Burnt Oak, this is up Orange Hill Road, around the corner from my mum’s house. It’s part of the old St. Roses’s Convent (I drew the main building of that a few years ago, see “the-convent-at-the-top-of-orange-hill/“), which was next to the long-since-moved St. James’s Catholic School, and also next to the Watling Community Center, which is where my mum and dad had their wedding party back in 1991. I used to walk past here most days as a kid. Well, some days. If I was walking to Edgware I would usually cut down Boston and up Littlefields to get into that side of Deansbrook. I used to walk past this way if I was heading up Deans Lane to the newsagents Eric and Mavis up by the Green Man, because they had a better selection of magazines and comics there, or to the Golden Fry chip shop. It was Golden Fry wasn’t it? No wait, Golden Fry was halfway up the Watling. I have forgotten the name of the chip shop; it’s called King Neptune now I think, but it used to be something else when I was a kid, I’m sure of it. There used to be a small police station across the street from that chippy, the Cop Shop. Anyway all that is on a different road. I would also pass this when I would go on my run, which would be all uphill, up Orange Hill, Deans Lane, past the Green Man (the junction with Hale Lane where there used to be a pub of that name, long since turned into a Harvester), up Selvage Lane to Apex Corner, where I would stop for a rest, before running back downhill again. That’s what I did in the early mornings while I was back in London (until my foot started hurting), and I thought to myself right, I should draw the rest of the convent. So I went out there in the morning and drew about half of this, adding in the rest of the details when I was sat down (resting that dodgy foot). It’s worth colouring in, but I couldn’t be bothered this time. Maybe I should make a Burnt Oak Colouring-In Book. There’s an idea.

If you want to see the previous one I drew, on another early morning walk, here it is. It’s funny, my memories of this particular building are usually after dark, this looming many-chimneyed building against a rainy purple-grey sky, an occasional light from a window, but here it is on a nice bright summer morning. 

Back in the Walk. I flew back to London for a little bit, one of my oldest friends is getting married in Ireland this month (he lives in Dublin), and so he had a stag party (that’s a bachelor party to my American audience) in London a month before, which is just about enough recovery time for us forty-somethings, and so I flew out to London to take part in that. My Mum was going to Spain during the same time though, so I went a little bit earlier to spend some time with her, which meant I got a week or so in London to (a) work from home in the evenings and (b) see friends and family and (c) do lots of London sketching. So I did lots of London sketching, and as always I start at home, looking out of my old bedroom window in Norwich Walk, Burnt Oak, which is up the northern end of the Northern Line at the edge of the north part of London. Zone 4, so not that far out. Takes about 30 minutes to get to Tottenham Court Road on the tube. I always wake up early on those first few days, though after a long journey I did arrive in Burnt Oak quite late in the evening. On this particular day I did an early morning sketch as the daylight was rising in the east above Watling Park. I showed it the old fellow who lives across the street in that house. I’ve drawn this view across the street since I was a kid.

Here are a couple of drawings I did for my art homework looking across the street in the evening in (checks dates) November 1988. That was a very long time ago.

I’m not going to show all my drawings of this street but here’s another one from more recently, 2014. You will notice that in between 1988 and 2023 there was at one point one of those pointy trees growing in front of the house across the street, and another which looks like a bush standing on a pole, which have both gone now.

This is a little newsagents on Deansbrook Road, Edgware (at the edge of Burnt Oak), near the side exit to the hospital where I was born. It’s not on a row of shops and nowhere near the parade of shops on the other end of Deansbrook, it’s surprising that it is still there. I used to pop into this shop on the way home from school, walking home with my friend Terry we would pop in here for a Mars bar or a Panda Cola, which was a generic tasting fizzy drink in a small bottle with a panda on it, that would only be about 15p (there were other ‘Panda Pops’ drinks such as orangeade or limeade, we would get hose from the school canteen at lunchtime). It’s near the corner of Fairfield Avenue. You walk up there from Deansbrook to get to the alley that leads into Edgware. Well, actually we would cut down an alley further up Deansbrook into Fairfield Crescent, before cutting into the alley to Edgware, so missing this shop entirely, but on the way home we would go this way to get a Panda Cola from this little shop. Panda Cola was all I could afford. If you came out with a Coca Cola or a Pepsi, people would look at you going, ooh look at flash bollocks there, off to his mansion.

Those alleys I mentioned a minute ago, they are still the shortest route walking from Burnt Oak to Edgware, and have been since my Mum was a girl. Despite having walked them a million times, I’m always wary. It had a dodgy reputation in the old days, you never knew who was hanging out there, and with so many dodgy people around these days (as everyone always tells me), you have to keep your eyes open. For me though I always think of one thing, a little dog called Rocky. When we were schoolkids, me and Terry would walk down the little alley, and if we were lucky, it would be empty, and we would pass through on our journey. It’s like playing an adventure game, roll a dice to test your luck. If we were unlucky, a little dog who lived in the adjoining house and whose name was Rocky (we learned from the dog’s neighbours, who went to our school) would be there at the end of the alley, he would see us and immediately give chase, forcing us up the badly-kept steps and out onto the busy Deansbrook traffic. Rocky was unrelenting. Rocky would not simply “let you pass by”. Rocky is long dead by now, but I bet his ghost haunts that alley. Terry and I still talk about him (if “do you remember Rocky” “the dog or the film” “the dog” “yeah” counts as talking about him).

Here is another sketch from my home area of north London. This is the Railway Tavern, which is up Hale Lane, which is in Edgware, or is it Mill Hill, or can we even say Burnt Oak? It’s kind of all three, and none of them. We used to call this area ‘Green Man’, people probably still do, because of the large old pub on the corner of Hale Lane and Dean’s Lane, which was the Green Man. On maps I think this area gets called ‘Hale’ or ‘The Hale’ though people rarely say that out loud (the name goes back to the 13th century). I think of it as Edgware, really. It’s near enough to the main part of Edgware, and technically Burnt Oak is Edgware too, though we all know different. My address growing up was ‘Burnt Oak, Edgware, Middlesex’, yet we were in London (Greater London, the big urbanized county, Zone 4 on the Underground) because Middlesex no longer actually existed. Our postcodes for Edgware and Burnt Oak are holdovers from the pre-Greater London era, being HA8 (confusingly the HA is for Harrow, we are in the Borough of Barnet), while nearby Colindale and the more countrified Mill Hill got London postcodes (NW9 and NW7 respectively). Never try to make sense of London postcodes by the way. You get ‘NW’ (north-west, easy), N (north), W (west), E (east) SW (south-west), SE (south-east), BUT no ‘S’ for South, and no ‘NE’ for north-east. You do get EC and WC for the cities of London and Westminster but don’t think they all correspond exactly. I remember the jingle from the old 1980s adverts, “Pass On Your Postcode, You’re Not Properly Addressed Without It!” Then there was the phone code – 01 for London, that’s what made sense, we were all in that. Then they decided no wait, let’s change that up a bit, you people on the inside can be 071, you lot around the edges can be 081. Then they phoned back a few years ago, wait wait, I’m not done yet, make that 0171 and 0181, yes that makes more sense. Then they phone back a few years later, wait wait wait, let’s make that 0207 and 0208, ok we are definitely done now. Then they said no wait, we have some more changes to make. By then everyone was like, sorry, they have invented mobile phones now, we don’t care. London eh. But this is the Railway Tavern, and where exactly is it? Well the postcode says NW7, so it’s officially in Mill Hill, that settles it. Their website however says they are in ‘the heart of Edgware town’ which is quite interesting. ‘Up Hale Lane’, that’s all that matters. Besides, there was another tavern called The Railway in Edgware near the station, which closed many years ago (the historic building is still there, being allowed to fall to pieces; I drew it eight years ago: https://petescully.com/2016/01/14/the-end-of-the-railway/). This pub however is still open, which is good to see. I actually have never been in here as an adult, but came in several times as a kid with my family. It was a good pub to bring the kids to, because there was a good garden out the back which had swings, and there were always other local kids to play with. I remember kicking one of those plastic footballs around here when I was about 11, and it kept going into a neighbouring garden, while parents drank in the pub inside. Those days always remind me of the taste of Coca-Cola in a glass bottle, not very cold, and salt and vinegar crisps. I thought about coming up to this pub in the evening while I was back to draw the inside, but didn’t get around to it. I have wanted to draw the outside for years though, I really like the shape of this building. I love a triangle.

Why is it called The Railway Tavern though? There is no rail line nearby (the closest being way down at Mill Hill Broadway), and it’s not by a tube station, which is a good mile away down at Edgware. Well, actually there used to be a rail line near here, passing through Dean’s Lane down the hill, going between Edgware and Mill Hill East. When we were kids it was long closed down, and the area was known as the Old Bomb, I presumed it had been bombed in the war and never rebuilt. In fact they did originally plan to have a line that ran between Mill Hill East, passing through this way and not only up to Edgware but well beyond, but it was never built. Ever wondered why there’s that bit of the Northern Line that squiggles out to Mill Hill East for some reason? Jay Foreman’s excellent Unfinished London video explains this whole thing much better than I can: https://youtu.be/jjuD288JlCs. The pub does apparently date back to the 1890s, but I think the building is later than that. This page on the London Borough of Barnet website gives a little history of the are called The Hale, and it mentions the ‘Railway Inn’. Next time I’m back, I should pop in for a pint.

As with most of my trips back to the UK, there’s usually a sketch from Burnt Oak at the start of it. I wake up early and get out for morning walk with my sketchbook, eager to draw something that isn’t the UC Davis Bike Barn or something. I didn’t walk very far on this one morning, just up to the corner of Orange Hill and Deansbrook, a couple of minutes form my mum’s house. I’m getting very conscious that I won’t be doing this forever. There will be a day when I don’t come back to Burnt Oak much, like everyone else who left, and maybe I won’t even come back to London as much; I’m always torn with the idea of letting London go, but I just can’t, can I. It’s still my favourite city, annoy me though it does. It is definitely feeling too crowded, and while that may be just because I’m coming from less-crowded Davis in a state designed for bigger cars and wider roads (I don’t even drive, I ride a bike), there seems to be so many more cars parked along all these narrow roads, crammed three or four fold onto small driveways built for one or two. I’m not a fan of this new ‘ULEZ’ (Ultra Low Emissions Zone) expansion that is happening – although London evidently needs to improve its air quality –  it forces a lot of people who do need their car to buy a newer car they can’t really afford. Mostly though I just think it’s a rubbish name, they really could have come up with something better, I mean if it didn’t sound like a 2nd-person-plural French verb ending it might catch on more with the crowd who don’t like the sound of that sort of thing. But as I see all the cars squeezing themselves around the streets in these old neighbourhoods, I think to myself something needs to be done to reduce or discourage the number of cars. This street in particular, Orange Hill Road, it seems there is usually traffic backed all the way up from Watling Avenue almost to Deansbrook, but when there isn’t, cars will sometimes bomb down here like it’s 200cc MarioKart. I was up early, but even at this hour there was a lot of traffic. This is the Watling Centre. I stood next to the bus stop across the street to draw; as this is Britain, people started queuing up behind me in a polite line, I had to gesture for them to go ahead of me. I’m still disappointed that TFL removed the very useful 305 bus route that came up here, joining our part of Burnt Oak with Edgware. So, the Watling Centre, this is where my mum and dad had their wedding party back in 1991. They obviously met a long time before that, otherwise I’d be a lot younger. I remember that party, we had a lot of family and friends there, friends we loved, family we liked, and also family we didn’t like, that’s how it goes, but it was a good party. There was a lot of dancing to Irish songs, small kids running around. My schoolfriend Terry came, I still have a photo of him in his blue cardigan. I remember eating an entire chocolate mousse cake, because when I was 15 I could eat everything in London and still be like a gangly skinny rake with unbrushable red hair. My uncle Eddie wheeled a shopping trolley with all the remaining booze in it back to our house, and then told me stories all night about my dad in the old days. Fun times. It’s funny, I know I have been to many other events here but I don’t remember them all now. I think this is where I briefly went to karate class, which despite being taught by a family friend, I only went to twice, with my neighbour across the street. There was another kid from my form class at school who showed up, and he was the sort of kid to take the piss the entire time and then continue at school next day, so I stopped going. In earlier years, I would go to the field next to this building with other local kids and look for conkers, because we all knew this was the best place in Burnt Oak to get good conkers. Anyway that’s enough “I ‘member when…” mawkish memories and city-planning moans. I have a few more London sketches to post, then it’s Scotland all the way. We had a great time up there, but I may have drunk too much Irn Bru.

It won’t be long until I’m home again, back in my little corner of the northern reaches of London, Burnt Oak. When I was back a couple of years ago I was going to draw this phone box on Orange Hill Road, on the corner of Littlefield, but ended up taking a picture and running down to the tube station. I saw the photo recently and thought I’d like to draw this now, so I pulled out the grey paper book and drew in brown pen. A proper London phone box you say, why isn’t it red and full of little windows? With a little man in a bowler hat and umbrella stepping out to read the Times with a cup of Early Grey? And a puddle of piss and escort service calling cards? Well it surely has at least one of the last two. I like that there was a little mini bottle of Chardonnay in there, Burnt Oak has really gone upmarket, a bottle of wine with your phone call sir? And some caviar truffles? Or will you stick with the Tennents Extra Strong? I grew up in Norwich Walk, just off Orange Hill, my dad lived until recently in Littlefield Road. When I was a kid my Godmother lived on the corner of Colchester Road right opposite this, and my brother and sister’s dad lived in the flats on Colchester until he died a few years ago. I used to bump into him for a chat right next to this spot when I’d be on my way to school or college. These were the phone boxes I grew up with, literally this one in fact. A lot of of the metal and glass ones had doors, this one did not, you were open to the elements. In the days before cellphones were everywhere, this is where I’d spend many an evening, if I could not use the phone at home (or didn’t want to). If this was occupied I’d have to walk down to the one outside the Library, and face yells of abuse from the yoofs hanging around there, all for my crime of having ginger hair. Invisibility was not an option. This one was closer to my house though. I remember being in here on a really frosty-cold night talking to my then-girlfriend, and you’d still get someone waiting outside asking, “how long you gonna be mate?” like there wasn’t another phone box just down the hill. Yeah, you remember the days of waiting for the phone to be free. Needing coins (remember coins? Cash? Ok grandad) to keep going. I mostly used phonecards by this point. Remember them, the green Phonecards you’d buy and place into the little Phonecard slot, not all the phones had those did they. I don’t mean the phonecards you’d get at those little shops up the Watling, where you for a fiver you could call Ghana for two hours, though I definitely got a lot of those in later years when I first met my future American wife. It’s ironic, I actually hate using the phone and will do almost anything to avoid it. Some people cannot get enough of the phone, and will spend hours on the bloody thing, walking around yelling. Now, it seems people have stopped understanding even how mobile phones are used. You see them walking around don’t you, not holding the phone to their ear like a normal person, but holding it up horizontally like it’s a slice of cake, speaking into what is probably the plug socket. And people go one further don’t they, walking around with the phone on speaker, so everyone can hear the person on the other end too. That happened recently and I felt like asking them, does the person you are talking to know their voice is being broadcast to everyone nearby? I realize I am fast on the Grumpy Old Man track, but some on kids, learn how to use the dog and bone.

But look at this thing. It’s like a piece of Roman Britain, standing for years after it’s served its purpose, with later civilizations not understanding what it was possibly for, marveling at the advanced technologies of these people from long ago. I’ll be back home soon, Orange Hill Road, and it might even be gone by now. It might even still be there, but converted into luxury flats. Wouldn’t surprise me.

I just got back last night from our two and a half week trip back to London (which included four nights down in the south of France), which felt too short, and now I’m totally exhausted after another very long transatlantic journey. Still, I’m stocked with a whole load of sketches; I didn’t have a plan of ‘must sketch this, must sketch that’ but ended up getting a lot in along the way, including a few morning walks around my home area of Burnt Oak, to see how much that has changed. The phone box in the last post has indeed been ‘disappeared’ after all these years (but not turned into flats, unlike most of what used to be Colindale). There is a lovely big colourful new mural on the corner of Barnfield and the Watling though that says ‘Burnt Oak’, which I was sketching in the image above. It was very good to be home again, to see my family. As I get older, I know these won’t last forever, and it was a long year between this visit and the last, a very long year. 

Anyway, one exciting moment on this particular trip was that I was asked by BBC London to provide a small section about Burnt Oak for the 30th anniversary show of the Robert Elms radio show. I used to watch Robert Elms on TV when I was a teenager, though I’ve never listened to his show (I live in America now, but didn’t listen to the radio much in London anyway) but I know of others who are fans of his show. Elms grew up in Burnt Oak on the Watling estate and went to the same school as my older siblings, though a few years before them. So the producers asked me if I could talk a little about my own experience of growing up in Burnt Oak. They actually asked while I was still in California, but when they got back to me I happened to be in Burnt Oak, so I met someone from the show for a quick 40 minute walk around the area, right before I had to rush to Stansted to fly to Marseille. We walked from the station and down Silkstream Parade to the library, over to Watling Park and then up to the Annunciation, before popping up to that big mural. We didn’t get up to the Broadway, to see where the Stag was or all the other things that have long gone. I noticed a sign outside the library announcing a couple of architectural walks coming up, one looking at three local parks, one at three local churches. It reminded me that I should really try to organize a Burnt Oak sketchcrawl some day, through USk London. Perhaps next year. Anyway, I didn’t know when the show itself would air, but while I was on vacation (I was actually walking around Monaco) my mum got in touch telling me that one of our family friends had heard it on the radio already, last Friday. It is available still on BBC Sounds, but will only be up for the next 24 days (so, until about July 21). The show is four hours long (bit long for me guv) but if you want to jump to the bit I’m in, it’s at about 36 minutes, not long after the Amy Winehouse song. It’s a nice little walk around my area, and only a few minutes long, but I hope you enjoy it. 

Anyway, back to the jetlag and travel exhaustion, I’ll rejoin the real world tomorrow…

While we are currently sweltering under this impossible Central Valley heat, it’s a good time to fly back to Burnt Oak. It’s always nice to go back home, for as long as I can still call it home. When I was a small kid going to Goldbeaters School, I don’t think I ever wondered what I’d be doing when I was in my late forties, and whether that would also involve flying back from America and doing drawings of Watling Avenue. (No, when I was six years old I just wanted to be Ossie Ardiles when I grew up). It has been a very busy past year, I say ad infinitum, but it really has. It felt like a long gap between trips back. I’ve wanted to come back for family reasons during this time, but I just hadn’t had the opportunity. I didn’t have time to mentally prepare, as if it was just never going to really happen, I wanted it so much. So, when I finally got back and walked around the old area, I felt a pretty big wave of emotion and even relief. Yes, a huge wave of relief to be home. It has changed so much, no doubt, but the Watling Estate is still old and recognizable. Communities have changed and evolved, but it still, in its way, belongs to me. That won’t last forever, so I draw it while it is still there. I’ve done a lot of Burnt Oak sketches on my trips back over the years – probably not enough. There are places that have now long disappeared that I wish I had drawn. There are places that disappeared many years before I left Burnt Oak that I wish I had drawn. The main thoroughfare of Burnt Oak is still Watling Avenue, although the shopping up here is not as good as it used to be. It was still possible to do all your shopping on the high street when I was young, rather than all in the supermarket, although we did have a Tesco up on the Broadway, a smaller one that annoyingly closed recently (Burnt Oak was the first place in the UK to have a Tesco, here on Watling Avenue in fact). At least there are still shops though. In many places I’ve been, the old shops sit empty, not deemed profitable enough by the property owners to serve a local community. Places evolve, but the Watling is still alive. Communities change, but I can tell there is still a sense of love for the area among the locals. It’s not always a safe area, for sure. Yet I do get the sense of the community feeling like the place is worth it. I love the colourful ‘Burnt Oak’ mural opposite the station. What really surprised me though is the new colourful ‘Welcome to Burnt Oak’ mural painted on the corner of Barnfield Road and Watling Avenue. It’s amazing, and features very Burnt Oak elements inside the big letters. (I will add a photo of it below). So that’s what I decided to sketch. I didn’t get as far as adding the colours, or even really finishing the scene, but I quite liked it like that. That corner, there used to be a fruit and veg stall there, I remember a guy I knew from scouts (Dillon? I just remember he was a QPR fan) worked there. Opposite where it says ‘Aksu Food’, there was another fruit and veg shop that my brother Johnny used to work at for quite a while. I do remember being sent down there regularly by my mum to pick up potatoes, five pound of spuds was fine, I hated being sent down for ten pound of spuds. Long walk back up Orange Hill with those. Next door to that there was a fishmonger, I still remember the guy’s face, I would go in there for crabsticks, they were cheap, tasted nothing like crab. Looks like there’s a fishmonger still, but further up. There was a hairdressers too just up Barnfield where the mural is, and I would be taken there as a kid, but as soon as I was old enough to get my haircut on my own I went to the barbers, not the hairdressers, and would go to the little one at the top of Market Lane (one of two small streets that run behind the Watling, the other being Back Lane, and neither being places you want to spend much time), and then later to Syd’s, in the alley behind Woolworths (now gone), where I would get my hair cut well into adulthood, the last time I went in was about ten years ago, right before a funeral. Ah, I wish I had drawn Syd’s.

Here are some photos of the big public artwork in Burnt Oak now. I love them, brightening the old place up. I couldn’t find the name of the artists, but they were delivered by Accent London, and there’s some information about them on the Borough of Barnet website. I did notice that the big ‘Welcome to Burnt Oak’ mural on the corner of Barnfield is painted over some concrete which has some old carved graffiti on it. I remember seeing those names carved into the wall a couple of years ago when something was removed from the wall revealing it, those names must have been hidden for years. Lots of ‘Bill’, a few ‘Jackie’, and even a ‘John’…are these my uncle and older siblings? This is where they grew up, went to Barnfield School, played Space Invaders in the chip shop nearby. I like to think it was them, back in the early 80s. Either way, I love that these names of young Burnt Oakers from the past, whoever they were, are preserved behind this new mural.

Above is Silkstream Parade, or one side of it, the little section between the station. There is another barber shop at the end of this row now, where years ago there was a little second hand bookshop packed to the gills with interesting old books (I would go in looking for old Roy of the Rovers annuals). It closed when I was a kid. Where the Afro Cosmetics shop now is, that was Alfred’s, where people got their school uniforms. It’s probably funny to Americans that British kids wear school uniforms, but that’s what we did. These days though I notice that most junior schools have uniforms too, which might have been true years ago as well (my little sister’s junior school did) but wasn’t the case at my old school Goldbeaters. I got my first school uniform at 11 at Edgware, though we got it from the school, not from Alfred’s. I think all the kids who went to St. James’s probably got their uniforms at Alfred’s. Who knows, it’s long gone now. There used to be a launderette along here too, until just a few years ago. I might even have a photo of it, I’ll try to draw it from that one day. And at the end there, a phone box. Remember I drew an old phone box that is now gone? This one is still there. I would have to go and use that one sometimes, there would often be a gang of kids sat outside the library yelling abuse across the street. I sat outside the same library to sketch this view. The sky was dramatic that first week I was back home, threatening a little bit of everything; a bit like London itself.

Finally, at the nearby junction with Orange Hill, a quick sketch of the entrance to Watling Park. I drew in burgundy coloured pen. The entrance to the park has always been sketchy, but I did love this park growing up. However I still avoid going down the left hand path beside the stream, because that’s where the gluesniffers used to lurk. You definitely still get wrong’uns hanging about there, and worse than the old glueys. Underneath the entrance is The Tunnel, a small, dark and foreboding portal which follows the Silkstream into the sewers, underneath the shops in total darkness until coming out some way up the Watling towards Silkstream Park. I never ventured far into The Tunnel as a kid, we were always a bit too scared, and never brought a torch (we did have the bright idea that you could float polo mints which glowed in the dark (!) and follow them down the stream) though I know my older brother and sister and my uncle Bill did venture deep into the tunnel to a place called The Witch’s Cave. Too many rats down there for me. Growing up in Burnt Oak though, Watling Park was the heart of the area for us kids, and it was at the end of my road so I spent a lot of my childhood down there. We knew all the hiding spots. It was a country unto itself in our imaginations, one that has never dislodged itself from the subconscious, and still appears in dreams just as it did when I was 8. Anyway. I do have a few more Burnt Oak sketches from this trip, but let’s get off one bloody memory lane and go down others. Incidentally, if you want to hear that episode of the Robert Elms show that I appeared in briefly talking about this little stretch of Burnt Oak, it’s still available still on BBC Sounds, for another 8 days. I have plenty more London sketches to share, and quite a few from the South of France as well, so check back soon…

And so to the end of my sketches from the recent trip (over a month ago now). I’ve been back in the excruciatingly hot summer of Davis, a record set of July temperatures, and trying to get back into the groove (what’s the difference between being in the groove and in a rut?). The summer is long, and I’ve been wishing to be back in London again. It won’t be long, I hope, but it is nice being there when the sun rises early and sets late, and now there’s finally a new government too after the mid-summer election. England losing the football final was a sour note. Lewis Hamilton winning the British Grand Prix (and British drivers suddenly winning F1 races in general after a long dominance by Max Verstappen) was a nice moment to celebrate. I prefer watching those races early in the morning over here in California anyway, on my couch with a cup of tea. I wasn’t always an early riser, growing up in Burnt Oak I wasn’t anyway. When I travel though I’m usually up first, and I’ll get some time and some nice breakfast with my Mum, those are the times I miss when I have to fly home again. I also like my morning walk around Burnt Oak, where I can see all the things that have changed or stay the same. Here are a couple of sketches from those morning strolls, after we’d returned from France and before we were going back to the US. Above, that is the Annunciation Church on Thirleby Road, though I sketched it from Gervase Road. I always loved this building. This is the main Catholic church for Burnt Oak, and so most of the Catholics I knew would go here, and go to school at St. James’s, or St. Martin’s for the juniors, or at the Annunciation Infant School next door to the church for the very young (my little sister went to those). I’m not a Catholic myself (having been christened at the local C of E church St. Alphage when I was a baby), and I’ve never been religious, so I didn’t have to go to church; I’d get to stay home on Easter when I was a kid and eat my chocolate eggs, but I also had to hoover the floor and dust the shelves, small price for being a heathen. I did go here many times though for one reason or other, weddings, christenings, funerals holy communions. My mum and dad were married here when I was 15 (though I was late, as I went to collect my great aunt). Mostly I spent time here in the community centre, in the Annunciation club upstairs where our local community would drink regularly (we would do the Quiz Night regularly, and my Mum would always win that; we loved a Quiz in those days, and when it was my Mum, my older sister and brother, and me together, we were an unbeatable quiz team in the Irish pubs of our neck of London back in the 90s). I remember watching USA 94 in there, the great moment when Ireland beat Italy and the place erupted. I spent a lot of time in the Annunciation Youth Club as well when I was 16 or 17. My (also non-Catholic) mate Terry and I would go there, hang out with the other kids, play pool, and watch TV; I remember watching the Euro 92 final in there, Denmark beating Germany. It was a good place for local kids, give us something to do, keep them off the streets and out of trouble, not that me and Terry were out getting into trouble, we used to just play football down Montrose, and walk over to Vibratanks the tropical fish shop to look at guppies. The youth club all went on a camping trip to Devon one summer, to the little town of Watchet, looking back at it they were great memories, you don’t think too much about them at the time. I remember telling ghost stories to everyone by the fire on the beach, the Hairy Hands of Dartmoor, the Beast of Exmoor, all those old chestnuts I used to read about. My mate Terry, now in Japan, used to live on Gervase Road so I would be down there all the time. We actually went top school on a different school on Thirleby Road, Goldbeaters, just a short walk from here. As I sketched, being morning there were young kids being walked to school by their mothers just as we had been decades before. I heard quite a few speaking Romanian, Burnt Oak has a big Romanian community now. I thought to myself, I remember the language our parents used to use in the mornings, when we were late for school. All the memories, I spent a good deal of time around here growing up.

And on my second last morning in Burnt Oak, I walked down Abbots Road, cutting past the old allotments and over to Deansbrook Road. I stood in the shade of a tree on the corner of Cressingham, looking out over the little parade of shops. There’s still a newsagent there, I got myself a cold fizzy drink. No Lilt any more, that delicious drink has now been replaced by yet another flavour of Fanta. I used to pick my little sister up from school when she went to St. Martin’s juniors in the Meads nearby. I hardly ever come down this part of Deansbrook any more, except for fish and chips. When I was a kid there was a good Chinese shop here that I’d be sent to pick up the takeaways from. My big sister lived nearby so I would also come into the shops on the way there when I’d walk over, usually on the way to babysit her kids. Of course the main attraction of Deansbrook was the Dassani Off License, which I note is still there. They had a video rental store at the rear, and that’s where we’d go on a Saturday night and pick out whatever action film we’d watch with my dad, and get some Munchies. They also had video games you could rent, so I’d get Nintendo or SNES games to play for a few days, when I couldn’t afford to have the actual thing. On the whole though, I’d often avoid this part of Deansbrook growing up, it was always seen as a bit rougher; even if the Watling was probably rougher, it was a bit closer to home, though geographically it really wasn’t; I lived between the two. You get this sort of thing into your head when you’re a kid, it might just be that the kids over this street were more likely to beat you up than the kids over that street, who might know you or your mates more, it’s all a bit random now looking back. Anyway, I finished this sketch but added in the colours later, on the plan back to California.

We flew back next day, into the long Davis summer, fiscal close, triple digits, and scanning the travel sketches, and a huge desire to just go back to London again. A day will come when I can’t go back as much, and I’m always wanting to get as much of it as I can until then, and bring my sketchbook to watch it as it keeps on changing.

A few weeks ago I was back in London for a quick visit to see my Mum and my Dad, but of course managed to get a fair bit of sketching and exploring in as well. I also had to draw Burnt Oak Station, which I didn’t sketch last time I was back, even though I had that little walk around Burnt Oak that was on the radio, starting out at the tube station. What I had forgotten was that 2024 is the actual centenary of the station being built. Back in 1924 there was an extension of the Northern Line into what they were calling ‘Metroland’, according to all the old posters, and these areas that were previously fields and small settlements, your Edgwares and Hendons and Stanmores, all became part of this large suburbia of an ever expanding London, full of nice terraced houses, or orange brick council housing estates such as the Watling Estate where I grew up (as did my Mum). Burnt Oak Station is a good starting point because you could say that the Burnt Oak we know started here. Well, we were all told at school that it started with the Romans, who used to burn an oak tree to mark boundaries of areas, and yes, it kind of did. The long Roman Road, Watling Street, arguably the most important of roads in Britannia, runs right through it up on a ridgeway and gave birth to the settlements around here (Red Hill was the village up there; I’m from neighbouring Orange Hill), now known as the Edgware Road, or Burnt Oak Broadway as it comes through this area. Burnt Oak Station is down from that on the street which was named Watling Avenue, and so some of the signs inside the station still read ‘Burnt Oak (Watling)’. Locals call that street ‘the Watling’. It’s changed a lot over the years. I was back in the iconic library at the corner of Orange Hill and the Watling, and was shocked to hear that it would be knocked down and replaced with a modern building full of luxury flats. I mean, FFS. Oh, but they will build another library around the corner in Barnfield, so oh that’s ok then. (Why can’t the flats go in Barnfield and keep the historic pyramid shaped library there?) Behind the station is a dingy car park and an old market area, I don’t know if the market is still on but it we used to go there when I was a kid. It was always full of rats when the market was closed. Anyway, that is going to be developed into loads more private flats, another whole development. I’m not sure the are can handle so many more residents, and these aren’t going to be cheap. Having seen Colindale become an endless sea of new tall buildings full of expensive flats, especially over the old Police training centre you could see from the tube, with very little making it feel like an area with community, I worry the same could end up happening to Burnt Oak. All the old pubs are gone. I had a dream that they knocked down Burnt Oak station and replaced it with something big and modern (like they are doing with Colindale now, to handle all its new volume of users), and that will probably end up happening. But I’ll enjoy it while it still looks like itself. One thing I remember from years ago, when coming up the Northern Line you could usually tell which station you were at if you couldn’t see the sign, each station along this way was painted a different colour – Hendon Central was light blue, Colindale was yellow, Burnt Oak was red. They changed that years ago, and mode those three paint in a cream and dark green paint job. Now they announce the stations anyway, and the big roundel signs are pretty visible. Lot of memories here, good and bad, but growing up this was the exit point to a more interesting world, as well as the familiar entryway back home. There’s nothing like that moment when, having travelled five thousand miles across the world, my train pulls in and I go up those little stairs again, knowing I’m just minutes away from getting to my Mum’s house for a nice cup of tea. Happy 100th birthday, Burnt Oak tube!

And so, the last few sketches from my short trip back home to London last month. While at home at my mum’s if I wasn’t out on a sketching day or visiting my dad in hospital, I’d sometimes go for a walk around Burnt Oak to see what’s changed; quite a lot, some good, some not really. I still look for what’s the same. The park at the end of the street has never had the best reputation, but Watling Park is where I spent my childhood with my friends from our street and the kids from all the other streets, so I thought I should bring my sketchbook back down there, since 2024 was all about drawing trees after all. It was a damp gloomy decembrous day, my tummy was full of mince pies. I stood by the stream and drew trees going across it. The sketch below is what I drew first, a tree that had fallen across the stream, I sketched quickly in pencil and added paint right there. Across the stream a very excitable dog was running around and up to people, I think it was a Staffy, and the owners weren’t bothered if it jumped up at people. I wasn’t keen on it jumping up at me while I painted so I worked fast. They didn’t walk on this side of the stream though. The one above was drawn in pen, but I didn’t colour it in until the plane journey home. This part of the stream has walls into the stream (see below), while the section above does not, though I was in roughly the same place, just turned around. The tree that had fallen, I think that may have been the one when I was a kid that had a Tarzan rope attached to it so we could swing across. The stream is so narrow that a kid can jump across anyway (well, usually) but the Tarzan rope was always the more adventurous way. I spent so much of my childhood here, when I wasn’t indoors drawing. So did my older brother and sister, and my uncle Billy, I always think of him when I think of the Tarzan rope. The view above, that’s the park I know. That little arched bridge, this is the middle one, there are three in the park. The stretch of stream between that one and the one by the old Bowling Green was full of bushes and hideouts, an adventure playground for us. There were stingy nettles, but also dock leaves, that is where we learned that old medical trick to heal the stings. That stream is properly called Burnt Oak Brook (we knew it as part of the Silkstream, though didn’t know the word ‘tributary’ in those days); we just called it ‘The Stream’, and it ran over towards the Meads, past the allotments. It was full of little stickleback fish, shopping trolleys, bits of old bike. We used to try damming it up with sticks and mud and whatever we could find, to see how long the dam would last. The stream always came back.

The Silkstream itself flows through various parks and underneath Burnt Oak and Colindale, and was sometimes treachourous. We grew up knowing there were dangers when playing by the waters; I don’t mean in those public service shorts that would go out on kids TV in the early 80s, “Charlie Says” and so on. When I was about five or six, there was a horrible day when some children died in different parts of the Silkstream, not in Watling Park but further down in Silkstream Park and another park in Hendon I think. The water was high from the rain and deceptively strong. One of them was a boy, also called Peter, who lived in the next street over from us, he was in my year at school. It was the first time I’d really experienced knowing anyone who had died, other than my grandad, and at such a young age I didn’t really understand. I remember a lot of kids at school crying, and kids in our street being in shock. I think I was playing down Watling Park myself that day with my neighbours, in those days that park was our babysitter, if we weren’t at home or in the street outside, that’s where we could be found, don’t go beyond. What I didn’t know until recently was that when this happened, and people started to hear about it, some kids heard ‘Peter’ and assumed it was me (there weren’t many Peters in our area, a lot of Marks and Lees and Davids but very few Peters). They went to my house and told my sister they heard I had died in the stream. I can’t imagine what she must have thought. I think she went straight down Watling and found me, we don’t remember now, she always knew where to find me, and I was probably in my neighbour Tasha’s house, the other place I spent my childhood. She was close to Peter too, and his family, and we found it difficult to talk about it back then, we were all so young. It didn’t stop us playing by the stream, but only in this part of it, which always felt safer and closer to home, but that day definitely stuck with us. We as kids in the area never stopped thinking about him.

There are a lot of changes happening in the park at the moment. The big playground by Cressingham Road has been taken out, hopefully another one will go in because that’s the last playground in the park. However there are three big ponds being added, and new paths across what used to be the big fenced off sports field, but is now part of the park proper. and on top of the hill, it looks like a little bandstand or something is being built. Hopefully not just a place for the junkies to sit out of the rain. I hope these are positive updates for the park, what they have done to Montrose Park looks great, although they did build a sports centre over part of it too. London is great for parks and they need to be both protected and improved; Watling Park has a bit of a wild feel to it, but it wasn’t always that way. When I was a kid there were still tennis courts, beaten down though they were, and when my brother and sister were younger there was a putting green, I always wondered why they referred to the little patch of grass where we’d play football as a putting green. There used to be another playground near Abbots Road, I would be there every day on the swings or the see-saw, and that huge tall metal slide with the cage on top that would never pass a health and safety inspection these days, and whose metal slide surface would heat up to about 500 degrees on a hot day. Still better than those horrible plastic slides that generate enough static electricity to power a small car. We’ll see what it looks like when I’m next back. The drawing above is of another tree I saw on that walk, next to a row of houses on Fortescue Road, I really liked the ramshackle fences. I only had time to draw a quick outline, so in fact I drew most of this a few days later. I think I remember a schoolfriend lived on Fortescue and I went to their birthday party when I was about six or seven, but that’s all part of the blur of childhood.

Ok, back to posts and sketches from California. Until next time, Burnt Oak. See you in the summer.