TIM BAKER

Been keeping busy on the watercolour landscape front. Firstly at the weekend I was visiting my Dad and his wife, and woke up early (and rather hungover!) on the Sunday and the sunshine was brilliant. So I went outside and spent an hour or so on their view from their hill looking over the ruins of Hambledon House which recently burned down. The view is always impressive especially the clouds. I then gave them the watercolour – one of my few signed pieces.

Then on Monday the weather was similarly good, sort of so I went out drawing and painting again. (I hate ‘local’ weather apps and their inaccuracy…checked Dark Sky and (Not)Accuweather many times and it said nope, no rain…So I went out, and it started raining, and the app usefully said ‘It’s raining’. No shit, Sherlock!).

So I did the first drawing in a bus shelter waiting for the light rain to stop – it did quite quickly, so I then did the watercolour of one of the building at Seething Wells. Seething Wells was a massive Victorian waterworks from the Lambeth Water Company and later joined by the Chelsea Water Company starting from the 1850’s to supply fresh water to London and to fight diseases like Cholera. Seething Wells is named after the Siden or Soothing Wells, water said to have medicinal properties.

There are and were filter beds, reservoirs and some amazing buildings that heavily feature the fleur-de-lys and even Italianate touches (John thought the first drawing above was of St Raphaels!). They look like churches or even cathedrals, the main part of them are thankfully listed, and some are used by Kingston University.

But the building I painted is on the other side of the road, I don’t think is listed as it’s not on the Historic England site. That side the filter beds are still there, although being cleared and there has been a dispute for decades over what to do with them, from refused massive supermarket to the most recent application in 2014.

I’m guessing the big bugbear is that the beds are not only a haven for wildlife, but also the Portsmouth Road is pretty busy as is, sometimes with queues of standing traffic, without an extra supermarket or homes or an attraction. In fact the council has been doing the opposite reducing that road down, to cater for cyclists.

There were some people in suits and clipboards inspecting the site the day I was painting it (from the public pavement), I spoke to a guy called Sean who liked what I was doing, and we chatted about how amazing the buildings are. I hope this one gets kept, it’s like a Mausoleum or Temple to Water. Nowadays it would be some ugly tin hut or something temporary or very brutally functional. The Victorians knew how to make the functional beautiful and make things last. (Another place on my list to visit is the insides of Crossness Sewage Works).

Also I loved drawing and painting something that isn’t so ‘chocolate box’ and rendering the graffiti in traditional watercolour. I want to do more of this – I am an industrial archaeology freak and fascinated by graffiti, and a lot of my foundation and early degree work was of ruined factories, wrecking yards and places like Ironbridge in Shropshire. It’s also definitely a companion piece to the 1930’s electrical substation down the road.

It is also my best building watercolour to date – as the drawings of the rest of the site show, I struggle a bit with those angles so I am practising. I’m apparently great at trees, but I want to be great at everything.