Regents Park – Nick Andrew. drawing projects

‘The Golden Dome and the Flying Saucer’ (Thursday 2 August 2018)

My second drawing visit to The Regent’s Park. The first was nearly 2 years ago (8 Sept 2016), to the southern section: Avenue Gardens, the boating lake, the bandstand and the perfect round of the central Queen Mary’s Gardens with its rose beds and outdoor theatre. Visit Sticks in the Smoke 30: The Regents Park (South side) to see the drawings made on that occasion, and to read the rich and royal history of this grand space.

Today I’m planning to explore the western and northern sections of the park. I walk in through the Baker Street entrance. To my right I can see the crisscross ironwork of the Clarence Bridge, which I struggled to draw on my last visit. The morning is heating fast as I turn onto the wide western path, following the lakeside. Waterfowl busy and teeming out onto the tarmac where squawking and piping knots are fighting over picnic leftovers. Ripples sparkle bright blue against the greenish lap of lake water.

The lake was excavated in the 1820s, opening out the course of the little River Tyburn in a naturalistic style across the south of the park. The River Tyburn rises in Hampstead, about 3km to the north, but today most of its flow is hidden underground in culverts or sewers. From the 1830s when the The Regent’s Park was opened to the public, the lake was a popular attraction, for boating, paddling, swimming and skating. During the severe Victorian winters of the mid 19th century, many thousands turned out on to the lake. Tragically, in January 1867, at least 40 people died here when the lake ice broke, weakened by the sheer volume of skaters.

On this sweltering day it’s hard to imagine the sting of icy air as I stroll around the children’s boating pond, where a girl in waders is picking litter caught in the island bushes. Over to Hanover Gate lawn where the sunbleached grass is dotted around its edge with a variety of trees and little copses (This sits just to the south of the 12 acre grounds of Winfield House -the grand Neo Georgian mansion residence of the US Ambassador, the second largest private garden in central London after Buckingham Palace). I find the canopy cover of a tulip tree and set up to draw towards the Hanover gate and the London Central Mosque. The shade is almost solid with only a few chits of sunlight getting through. An occasional gust of cooler air is a momentary respite. The papercut leaves brittle and rattling above. The mosque dome glints copper gold. But also shimmery greens and blues. It rises like a fleeting mirage between the treetops, unearthly and hardly solid at all. I struggle and fail to get those transient and subtle colours right (The London Central Mosque with its striking golden dome was designed by Sir Frederick Gibberd and completed in 1978. The main hall can accommodate over 5,000 worshippers. It is joined to the Islamic Cultural Centre (ICC) which was built in 1944 on land donated by George VI to the Muslim community of Britain).

There’s a constant flow of tourists and families. Many people in Islamic dress. A woman in hijab with her daughter comes over to look at my drawing. The young girl loves drawing and wants to be an illustrator. She asks an enthusiastic string of arty questions.

All the time I’ve been drawing, a man has been stretched out asleep in the foot of the far hedge. The shadow gradually moves away and he eventually wakes up, flustered. He hastily pulls his things together and staggers off towards the gate to the Outer Circle. Behind me I hear a man shouting. A harassed dad is letting off steam at his two young children. He drags them past, hot and sobbing. On a day like this I think they should all just go and eat ice cream. And dangle their bare feet in the cool lake water.

The day has heated more. I cross the bridge at the lake’s head and walk through stands of woodland. Oaks, plane, maple provide leafy relief. I wander through the Winter Gardens towards the outer circle. Across the road the Gorilla Circus trapeze school is in full swing. I stand and watch for a while. A latticework of ropes and swings. Anxious looking students being coaxed to take a leap into the warm August air.

Then back, across to the north section of the park, which opens out into a wide plain of roller flattened fields, parched horizontal bands in every direction (this part of the park was originally left open and undeveloped to protect the views from the villages of Hampstead and Highgate). Crows pick listlessly at the scuffed ground. I make a hasty beeline across the pitches towards a further clump of trees, narrowly avoiding an all- women fitness class, who are energetically and sweatily star jumping to the enthusiastic whooping of their coach.

I dive into the welcome shelter under a lime tree in a wilder fringe, where dried grasses droop and tall thistles cluster. Sports are happening all around: cricket, baseball, football. Much cheering, yelling, clapping, whistling and clack of bat on ball.

I set up to draw across the pitches, towards the clumped trees of St Mary’s Gardens and the Euston office blocks behind. The BT tower a sci fi space rocket stands ready for blast off. Close to me a flying saucer has landed. It sits raised up on a grassy mound and surveys these 360 degrees of dried out fields. This is the Regent’s Park Hub. Opened a few years ago, a focus for all the sporting activities here, providing changing rooms, showers and cafe. An oasis and a lookout across the sports ground. Two toddlers are roly-polying down its slopes and yelping as their mothers chat on the cafe terrace.

A cricket game has finished, the young players excitedly chattering, file down the path below. Scrunch of shoes on scatterings of brittle lime leaves.

I drain the last dregs from my water bottle. It’s tepid. My thoughts drift towards the ice cream kiosk I passed on the way here.

In his ‘Sticks in the Smoke’ project, Nick Andrew has been regularly visiting, researching and drawing different publicly accessible parks or gardens in London since January 2016, exploring the theme of city green spaces from the perspective of a rural landscape painter. The first two sketchbooks will be published as a book in late 2018. www.nickandrew.co.uk . Nick is grateful to London Parks & Gardens Trust for their support www.londongardenstrust.org.

The Regents Park, Chester Rd, London NW1 4NR
Opening times: 5am – dusk

Google earth view here

(Thursday 8 September 2016)

This is another park that’s so huge (182 acres) that I can’t possibly sum it all up in one visit (I’ll return at some point over the next few months to explore the wider and more open northern meadows, pitches, winter gardens and canalside walks, not forgetting a glimpse through to the zoo).

I’ve just this week finished reading the amazing John Fowles book ‘The Magus’ in which, coincidentally, the final chapter is set in Regents Park. His description is so evocative:

“The park was full of green distances. of countless scattered groups of people, lovers, families, soilitaries with dogs, the colours softened by the imperceptible mist of autumn, as simple and pleasing in its way as a Boudin beachscape”

Today I’m sticking to the southern section, east of the boating lake. Even this part is like a progression of different gardens, jigsaw- puzzled together, each with its own character. There is a ring road called the Outer Circle, which circumnavigates the whole park for over 2.5 miles, and the Inner Circle which is about half a mile in circumference. These, apart from the linking roads, are the only routes for motor traffic.

The tree lined paths and straight hedged formality of the Avenue Gardens remind me of a Parisian Park. Ornamental fountains or decorative urns at every intersection and colourful box- hedged beds. At a distance the strolling figures could be promenading Victorians. But Marylebone Green, just next door, by contrast, is a proper village green, rough- grassed, tree- shaded, mole- hilled. You just want to run across here tugging an old fashioned kite!

There is a pull which draws you away from the noise of hectic Marylebone Road, towards something sweeter, like the pull of nectar for a bee. So I cross York Bridge and through the gently meandering and wooded waterside walk. And the banks are crowded with every kind of waterbird! A group of hunched herons are standing around in their grey tailcoats like a bunch of bored wedding ushers; they couldn’t care less about me being so close (on river walks at home, you can’t even tiptoe closer than 25 metres to a heron without it taking off with an annoyed, pterodactyl cry).

Here I can almost imagine myself traipsing a winding track in the vast Forest of Middlesex that, a millennium ago, thickly blanketed the land from here northward, up over Primrose Hill, the whole of north London and further. Before the 16th century it was a mix of woodland and rough pasture belonging to Barking Abbey. It was appropriated by Henry VIII in 1538, during the Dissolution, adding the land to his growing collection of Royal hunting grounds.

The parkland was seized by Cromwell during the Civil War and much of the remaining forest’s timber was cleared and sold to pay off war debts. After the Restoration in 1660, the land was returned to the crown and was leased out to tenant farmers, who supplied the city markets with milk, butter and cheese.

On the bank, just before the boating lake there’s a planting of young birch, gleaming against the dark strap of Clarence Bridge. I set up my easel where I get the view through to a ribbon glimpse of water. It’s a very warm and sunny day, but pretty breezy, so I edge back into the shade of a mulberry tree. A branch keeps getting blown into my neck so I bend it away and clip it temporarily to another branch with my spare bulldog clip. Two Egyptian geese flap down and immediately stage a squabble then lose interest in fighting and start earnestly pecking at the grass, taking surreptitious glances at me with their unblinking orange eyes.

The piping, squawking and cawing of waterfowl is punctuated by the incessant squeal and clash of the gate into Regents University grounds just behind me. A constant flow of park visitors (just as Fowles describes above) across the bridge, break into shifting colour diamonds through the gaps in its iron latticework.

In 1811, the Prince Regent saw this area as a perfect location for a new summer palace and commissioned John Nash to make it happen. Nash’s original idea was for a circular park, with a lake, a canal, the palace and 56 private villas set in ornamental gardens. The whole would be surrounded with streets of grand Regency terraces. But it didn’t all go to plan: the fickle Prince’s interest was diverted by other projects, such as Buckingham Palace and the Brighton Pavilion so, although the park was established (and renamed as The Regents Park), there was no palace and only a few of the planned villas were built. However, Nash did manage to build the white stucco terraces and sweeping Regent Street to link the Park with other Regency schemes such as Carlton House Terrace and Buckingham Palace.

Some of the park was opened to the general public from 1835. Other portions were leased out to local societies and groups, ranging from The Royal Botanic Society to the Zoological Society (which still runs the Regents Park Zoo) and various sporting, scientific and educational bodies. Each of these portions were developed differently which has led to today’s diverse patchwork of gardens, recreation grounds and park buildings.

I pack my things and step back onto the path. The breeze has dropped and the heat is building. I walk alongside the lake; the mass of waterfowl reluctantly letting me through. A couple in a blue pedalo are having steering problems and seem to be going in circles, backwards. I cross the lawns, between deckchairs, push under the swaying curtains of a high weeping willow, with flickering reflections and glimpses across the blue banded water. And out, to pause by the bandstand (there’s a memorial stone here to the seven bandsmen of the Royal Green Jackets who were killed by an IRA bomb in 1982 while performing a lunchtime concert).

I feel that ‘nectar’ pull again and am drawn up the slope, across the Inner Circle road and into the perfect round of Queen Mary’s Garden (named after the wife of King George V). This 17 acres was originally used by the Royal Botanic Society for nurseries and a huge conservatory, but they gave it up in 1931. It was relandscaped and planted and opened to the public to experience its exotic leafy borders and Mediterranean gardens and colourful beds and walks. And secret corners. A pond with little rills. And lawns and trees. The conservatory was demolished and later, on its site: the Triton fountain built, jetting high (with gleaming and dripping mer figures, as a memorial to artist Sigismund Goetze), .

I buy a cup of tea from the cafe and walk on and, as I leave behind the aroma of pizza and chips, there’s a syrupy, heady scent wafting to greet me. I’m lured to the rows of rectangular rose beds next to the stately Jubilee Gates (donated by Goetze for George V‘s Silver Jubilee in 1935). I’ve never been the greatest fan of roses, but these beds are truly magnificent! (There are around 12,000 rose plants of many varieties in these gardens). Ablaze with vibrant colour, petals pierced by bright shards of sunlight, alive with bees and gusts of breeze. I have to draw! Drawn closer by the intoxicating cocktail of scent and colour and movement. And the sun beating down. Bursts of laughter and applause bounces across the lawns from the Open Air Theatre on the opposite side of the garden (performing ‘Pride and Prejudice’ today).

As I draw, a magpie hops in amongst the rose bushes. It re-emerges with a crimson bud in its beak and pecks at it on the grass. Then hops back in to pick another!

The Regents Park, Chester Rd, London NW1 4NR
Google earth view here