Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I enjoy drawing bits of buildings, often the side that the architect didn’t intend us to see. This window showroom at the top end of Cluntergate, Horbury, was drawn with a fine Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen as we sat in the Caffe Capri opposite.
The watercolour was added later using a photograph I took on my Olympus Tough as reference.
At first sight the gable end of a house might not seem the most inspiring of subjects but it’s surprising how absorbing such a common sight can be if you keep looking at it for half and hour or more.
Walking down into Horbury to buy sandwiches I get the chance to draw more gable ends as I sit in the Caffe Capri waiting for my order. I make a mental note of the colours. Later, as I add the watercolour, I make an informed guess about where the shadows were falling.
It’s a change for me to use a bit of imagination in reconstructing a scene after the even. I think about Cezanne’s studies of the huddle of red roofs of the village of Gardanne which seem like a starting point for Cubism.
I rejoin Barbara at her sister’s and get a slightly different view of the house beyond the boundary wall.
The paper in my Moleskine sketchbook is buff which isn’t ideal for scanning but I’m enjoying the mellow tone it gives my drawings. This my out and about sketchbook, so why not indulge myself with its gentle warmth.
It’s a tough life, delivering books all over the landscape and on the return trip from my book suppliers I’m starving so, with a voucher in my wallet, how can I resist calling at Pizza Express, Meadowhall Centre, Sheffield, for a Giadriniera (veggie) classic pizza and a Caffe Reale (cappuccino plus figs and marscapone).
It’s also an excuse to call at the Apple store and marvel at the Retina display iMac!
A grey heron doggedly makes its morning rounds against an equally grey sky.
The cathedral spire, looming out of the afternoon fog, appears to connect with the cloud base.
The Westgate gulls are there again, gyrating around some centre of attraction hidden down in the brick-banked beck.
A few white trumpets of greater bindweed remain on the twisting vines on a chain-link fence at the edge of a car park.
I return to a dozen wasps, some dozy, some dead, to evict from my studio this afternoon. The way three of them were huddling up in the top corner of the window this morning, I’d guess that they were hunkering down for the winter but only the queens will make it through to the spring.
They’ve been nesting in the roof-space in an ever-expanding colony since midsummer.
A hill across the Calder valley from Wakefield has been created by landfill, taking waste from across the district and beyond. I’ve seen huge flocks of gulls swirling over it but this afternoon they’re gathering in smaller groups on playing fields around the city and near Westgate Beck, which runs alongside the Dewsbury road into town.
As the sun sets, more gulls are making their way down the valley towards Pugneys country park lake, which has long been a gull roost.
Distant moors are turning bronze-gold as the sun dips behind them. From Pinderfields, looking back to the city across twelve acres of open fields (now earmarked for residential development) you appreciate how Wakefield, a market town at least since early medieval times, fits into the landscape.
Migrating birds travelling north or south across Yorkshire or from east and west across the Pennines, follow similar routes to the Roman roads, packhorse trails, inland navigation, rail routes and motorways that have played such a part in the development of the town.
A ragged row of trees by a car park on the edge of the city has now turned to full autumn ochre.
Looking for some old slides I came across this Leeds street scene from the early 1970s. It’s the sort of everyday view that it would never normally occur to me to photograph. Martin Salisbury, one of our tutors in graphic design at Leeds Polytechnic, suggested that I should go out and photograph the city to bring a bit of contrast to a project on prehistoric Yorkshire that I was working on.
The streets that I walked through are already part of history and I wish that I’d taken more shots.
When I see archive film of events such as the miners strike of 1974 (there was another ten years later) it’s hard to believe that the environment looked so monochromatic and dismal.
Today television dramas set this period are usually shot in low key colour. My Agfa Gavaert colour slides show that that’s not artistic license; it really was like that.
It’s so long ago that even the minis were half-timbered. In every photograph that I’ve looked at so far, all the vehicles that I can identify are British-made. Those look like Rovers in the background.
And would you believe that there are no parking restrictions so near the centre of the Leeds?!
Richard Knowles of the Rickaro Bookshop in Horbury recently came across these photographs of Victorian Wakefield. They were probably used as business cards by George & John Hall, photographers, who had premises at 26 Westgate.
Someone, presumably George, has dated three of the photographs Saturday, 15 July 1876.
The Butter Cross was built in 1707 and, according to some sources, demolished in 1866/67, but that was ten years before the date on the photograph. Wakefield council still have one of those pillars but I’m not sure where it is kept since the old art gallery, where it was displayed in the garden, closed.
The medieval Chantry Chapel now has a mid-twentieth century facade so these photographs are a valuable record of these buildings but it’s the incidental detail that I particularly like.
The shops by the Butter Cross would be a useful reference if I was illustrating Dickens or painting the Paddington Green backdrop for Oliver!
The Six Chimneys, an Elizabethan house, stood on Kirkgate, on the site of the present roundabout and pedestrian underpass. It collapsed following structural alterations at 7.45 p.m. on 16 May 1941.
To judge by the shadows, this was taken on the Saturday afternoon. Holden’s (the butchers?) has more or less sold out apart from a flitch of bacon and a single sausage (if that’s what it is!). There doesn’t appear to be any glass in the window, unless Mr Holden had gone to the expense of fitting plate glass.
Bell’s the coopers are displaying an impressive array of baskets and barrels, no doubt all made of locally sourced materials, most of them biodegradable.
The parish church wouldn’t become a cathedral until 1888.
Considering that this is the centre of town at half past eleven on a Saturday morning Wakefield seems uncannily quiet. Where is everybody?
Three boys eyeing the camera and this porter or street-sweeper has stopped to chat to a woman who appears to be carrying a bag.
Handcarts seem to be a common feature around town. It probably wasn’t worth the trouble of loading barrels, baskets and boxes onto a horse drawn cart for delivery around town, so the porter and the delivery boy would have been a familiar sight.
I remember local author Stan Barstow telling me that one of his first jobs was to take a handcart as far as Lupset on the Saturday morning delivery round for one of the Horbury butchers. From a later period, I remember a big black butcher’s bicycle with a large rectangular basket between the handlebars, parked outside one of the High Street butchers in Horbury.
Finally, here are a couple of Saturday morning strollers, stopping for a chat on the Chantry Bridge.
As we’re looking down on them, this must have been taken from the Kings Mill.
What were they chatting about? Wakefield is lucky in that one of my predecessors William Banks who, like me, wrote a book of walks around Wakefield, took the trouble to make a note of the town’s dialect and phrases.
So they could well have been saying;
‘Hah goes it? Owt fresh?’
‘Naah, nowt; what’s t’best news wi’ thee?’
So, if you’d like to know a little about the words these street folk of old Wakefield used for weather, food, childhood and schooldays, the countryside, proverbs and a few supernatural tales, you can order a copy of my book Wakefield Words.
Price £3.99, post free (and as it’s a small paperback, for once I can make that post free outside the UK too).
If they ever invent a time machine and you get whisked back to Victorian Wakefield, it might make a useful phrase book! I was fascinated by William Banks collection of words and phrases and, as you’ll see from the book, I had fun adding cartoon illustrations to bring them to life. I’d always wanted to do a real little paperback book and I’m really pleased with this one. It’s quite jolly and I love the smell of a fresh paperback. Mmm! – you don’t get that with a digital version, do you?
More of my publications can be found at Willow Island Editions or, if you happen to be in Horbury, you can find the full range of titles at the Rickaro Bookshop.
My thanks to Richard Knowles of Rickaro for the loan of these evocative photographs.
Link; Rickaro Bookshop, Horbury
IT’S RARE for me to have a whole hour free so to make the most of it, while I wait for Barbara to finish work, I draw the bookshop, starting with the door frame and working across the double-page spread, running out of ink halfway and borrowing a pen from Barbara to finish.
With any complicated subject I have to establish an anchor point before I can start mapping everything in its place. Those long verticals of the door frame that I started with on the left weren’t much help and it was only when I established the leaded window above the door that I was able to get a grip on proportions. The 45° pattern made a useful grid.
You can see where this went slightly wrong as the window started going into perspective on the right, my drawing equivalent to the distortions you’d get if you were photographing the scene with a wide-angle lens.
THIS SKETCHBOOK drawing was made from the life drawing studio in Batley School of Art, probably in the winter months of 1968, looking down on Batley swimming baths. I came across it this morning when I was looking through some of my teenage holiday journals in the attic.
The box on the windowsill is one that we were set to design and make in the college workshop. In it I can identify a pen knife, pen holder, compass and ruling pen, the tools of my trade as a foundation student, and beside it are bottles of blue, yellow and green Indian ink.
The yellow box on the left contains children’s wax crayons; ‘Noddy’ crayons, branded with the name of the Enid Blyton character.
Rubbing these crayons on my sketchbook page laid the foundations for a kind of poor man’s scraperboard which I then, with difficulty, painted over with India ink which I could then scrape through to produce highlights such as mouldings, mortar and leaded windows.
This is a long and laborious way to produce a drawing but it’s evident that I enjoyed building up the textures.
It’s successful in bringing back to me the drabness of Batley at that time when smokeless zones were a recent innovation. I love the dour stonework and the glowering skylights which you can’t imagine would ever allow fresh air and sunlight filter down into the changing rooms below.
I never swam in these baths.
Wall Rue, Asplenium ruta-muraria grows alongside the Rusty-back Fern in the crevices of an old wall in Ossett. It is a common fern of walls and limestone crevices.
Leathery leaves and long wiry roots are useful adaptations for conserving water.
Like the Rusty-back it is a member of the Spleenwort family, used as a herbal remedy for diseases of the spleen and also in the treatment of rickets.