London Songlines

Notes from the field. The perambulations and musings of Alice Stevenson : illustrator, artist and author of Ways to Walk in London.

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This morning I walked through the overgrown, green tunnels of Nunhead Cemetery. I found a sailors grave hidden amongst the ivy, a reclining angel and a pair of shrunken graves.

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I was recently invited to create a walking playlist for the blog of Folk Days, a Berlin based, ethical fashion branch. I created a four hour soundtrack for an imaginary wander around Berlin, on a late June afternoon/evening.

Making this playlist caused me to think a lot about the act of walking whilst listening to music on headphones. I’ve heard numerous criticisms of this, that it’s not “mindful” or healthy to cut yourself off from the world in this way and create a bubble for yourself. I personally couldn’t disagree more.

For me, walking and music go together perfectly. Like for thinking, walking is the perfect speed for listening to music. You’re body’s movement and the slowly unravelling scenery enable you to listen and absorb the music, in a way that I find impossible if I am just sitting down at home. Whatever you are listening to and your suroundings, combine to create a truly unique experience. Music can totally alter or enhance the environment you are in, just as a place can cast a new light on your favourite songs.

Many years ago, in the depths of severe heartbreak, I stomped for hours around east London accompanied by Mark Kozelek, and the act of walking off my misery and listening to music that so perfectly articulates emotional pain, were key in helping me recover. During a protracted stay in San Francisco, I wandered up and down the pastel coloured hills listening to Sandy Denny and Shirley Collins, creating a blissful state of bittersweet longing for home.

If this makes me, antisocial or detached then so be it. Walking and listening to music is a wonderful and rich adventure and it’s joy lies in the fact that, like many of the best experiences in life, it is truly private and solitary.

Go here to listen to my playlist for Folk Days.

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Once again, I've been writing about looking down, about letting myself be mesmerised by the incidental patterns created on the ground by everyday detritus. In "Ways to Walk in London", I focused on looking at the ground whilst walking from Bethnal Green to Old Street. Leaves and berries framed in paving stones and a strangely squashed plastic bag became the basis for painting and drawings. I've been visiting beautiful places recently, but I find that discovering beauty in the overlooked details of unremarkable places, is still somehow the most rewarding of all creative processes. #waystowalk #lookingdown #londonperspectives

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I spent the weekend walking around the eerie moonscape of Dungeness with my photographer friends; Nick Ballon and Alma Haser. Their keen eyes noticed odd details in the landscape and underfoot. This caused me to reflect on how when walking with friends, we gain multiple experiences, the journey through our own eyes and those of our companion or companions. I walked with Alma two years ago for the Shadwell Basin Chapter of Ways to Walk in London She noticed things,I wouldn't have seen: a domed lamp above us against the deep blue of early evening, glowing like a planet and a red trianlge shaped piece of wood peering over the wall like a sharks fin.

My walks and journeys are as much a part of my creative output as the drawing and writing that follows them. In this way, every walk I've taken with a friend is a collaboration of sorts. Without which my work would not be able to exist as it is.

The cheif artwork for "Shadwell Basin" now forms part of my set of 6 Greeting Cards which are available to buy here

Support Alma's kickstarter campaign for her new Photography Book here

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When I created the artwork for my book Ways to Walk in London, it was partly a design based decision; half the book’s artwork to be black and white and half in colour, and partly and inevitable part of the creative process. For some of the walks from the book, the memories they created, came into being fully formed in technicolour and I’d refer directly to my minds eye when making the corresponding visual response. Others memories existed in monochrome, I’d visualise patterns of line and form but colour was either absent from the image, or would shift and alter according to my mood. These became the black and white illustrations for the book, which now make up "London Perspectives" ;a book of 20 colouring postcards, just published by September.

On receipt of my copies, I began colouring them in myself. At first my attempts were clumsy, I usually draw or paint directly in colour or not at all so the act of “colouring” pre existing drawings was pretty new to me. However, I persisted and it has become a new and surprising creative practise, my drawing of the Barbican Pedway has become a Bauhaus-esque patch work quilt design, a dreamy cloudscape has emerged from behind the monuments of Kensel Green Cemetery and the Parkland walk has become a tropically vibrant enclave. In doing this, the practise of Autochrome comes to mind, the Victorian process of adding coloured tint to photographs: colourising memories.

For me, these drawings are completed images in themselves. Memories of a specific place and time reconstructed in line and pattern. So by adding colour,and new details to them anew, over a year after drawing them, is like delving back into these memories and expanding them, turning them into something new. It’s interesting to actually engage with these drawings again, like many artists, I don’t dwell greatly on completed work, my mind being entirely engrossed in my current projects but by colouring in these illustrations, I am re-exploring them. My felt tip traces black dashes that were originally details caught in the corner of my eye on a February afternoon two years ago on a disused suburban railway line in North London,. Now these marks are are starting point for a new patterns and colour schemes emerging into the world.

It’s been fascinating and pleasing to see the outcome of people’s colouring in of my postcards. Suddenly infinite versions of the same image exist. I see it as an endless, ongoing collaboration between me and anyone who picks up a felt tip or a crayon and starts colouring and doodling.

London Perspectives Colouring Postcards can be bought here. Please share your colourings on Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #LondonPerspectives.

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In the process of working on my forthcoming book, I am re-reading fiction set in the UK, that I loved as a child and that left some sort of permanent impression on my imagination and memory. This has led me to return to “The Dark is Rising”; a series by Susan Cooper, where three siblings and the mysterious archaeologist “Uncle Meriwether” embark on adventures connected to ancient Cornish legends, amongst it’s wild and craggy landscape.

I recently read the first of the series “Over Sea and Under Stone” (published in 1965), for the first time since I was about 9. I found, unlike some other childhood favourites I’ve reread; the writing itself, somehow lacked the haunting atmosphere I had recall so powerfully and just felt like a well-written, adventure story. (I should say at this point that I believe the series does get darker as it progresses). What did turn out to be a wonderful discovery however, were the illustrations by Margery Gill. Sparsely spread across the book, her graphic and inky line rendered an imagined Cornish landscape that reignited something deeply embedded in my memory, and I realised it was these images, combined with the story that had formed such a powerfully, atmospheric world in my imagination as a child.

The quality of Margery Gill’s illustrations; the graphic compositions combined with the expressive and inky brush marks of her illustrated Cornish landscape create a perfect canvas on which I projected images and emotions triggered by the story. This made reading these books (as well as many others) a most immersive and powerful experience as a child. This combination of words and pictures created vivid and emotionally wrought, imaginative landscapes for me that I still carry around, and the memory of them often feels achingly real although they are impossible to pin down or locate in reality. On some level as an adult I am continuously chasing these ever-elusive dreamscapes, and I think this endless search, is ultimately why I write and why I draw.

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These drawings are inspired by stars and spikey pine branches.

A Very. happy Christmas and Midwinter merrymaking from Alice Stevenson.

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It’s a Thursday afternoon in late November at around 3.30pm. It is still light but the overcast sky is darkening as if a storm were approaching but it’s just evening encroaching on the day. I have been walking from Whitechapel to the West End. As I pass through the city, only sporadic indicators of the season’s festivities interrupt the grey efficiency of my surroundings. As someone who is generally unmoved by the sparkle of the Christmas period, I enjoy this ordinariness, bracing myself for the barrage of branded neon that awaits me further into town.

Making my way down Queen Victoria Street, the corner of my eye is caught by delicate, silver glimmers on my right. They are the Watling Street Christmas Lights: tasteful silver bulbs strung up in rows and sparkling gently in the grey afternoon sky, like dewdrops on a spiders web. I walk to the centre of the street: the strings of light form a circle, running inwards to the centre where a cluster gold lights hang down, like legs of a baby squid in golden batter or a fly caught in the centre of the web. Around me, office workers march toward destinations or stand outside pubs and cafes, chatting and drinking, ignoring this delicate, festive display above them.

Looking westwards, the lines of lights glint against the backdrop of St Paul’s cathedral. I find a quiet beauty in the combination of these droplets of silver and the pale grey stone of the cathedral. I am pleased to have accidentally experienced a fleeting sensation of “the magic of the season”, on this pedestrian side street in The City of London.

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Last week I was having a tutorial with a young art and design student, discussing ideas for a project she was starting about the London Underground. New to London, most of the words on her brainstorm were along the lines of “alienation”, “loneliness” and described tube travel as a generally negative experience, highlighting the much-cited drawbacks of urban living. To avoid her project descending into angst-ridden cliché, I encouraged her to consider the positive aspects of travelling on the Underground from both a societal and personal perspective. Aside from obvious pros: convenience, environmental etc., she identified a certain guilty pleasure in joining the rat race for ten minutes or so, of getting on a crowded tube carriage, descending into a subterranean realm of passive aggression, plugging into your headphones and letting your consciousness going inward, fiercely ignoring your fellow travellers, occasionally surfacing to silently hate someone who has accidentally shoved into you.

I could relate to this, as a lifelong Londoner, I’ve always had a somewhat mixed relationship with tube travel, generally preferring above ground when possible but occasionally finding the impersonal, heard like atmosphere of a busy tube journey, where everyone is entirely out for themselves and low frequency loathing vibrates in the air, oddly cathartic.

This contemplation of my relationship with The Underground has coincided with TFL’s release of their first official Tube Map, which includes walking times between stations.

I am an urban walker and this development pleases me. As any Londoner knows full well, our city’s best bits lie between and beyond the main attractions, To me, the essence of London can be found in the way an atmosphere of a particular area transitions into somewhere else, for example the subtle change in feeling as Dalston becomes De Beauvoir, or in the hidden gardens between between Kings Cross and Russell Square. These experiences are best found on foot. Hopefully this version of the tube map may encourage visitors to experience the above ground world between attractions, to take surprise detours and discover unexpected architectural gems and absorb the complex and contradictory atmosphere of London. Seeing London as more than a collection of island villages in a sea of angry, crowded tunnels can surely only be a good thing.

This new map has also caused me to consider the way that official maps shape how we think about places we inhabit. I realised from a young age that the iconic mapped evolved from Harry Beck’s 1930 design, did not actually reflect the city’s true dimensions but it is still deeply etched onto my mental and emotional construct of the city. It is there in my head, like a net or a grid thrown over the London that exists in my mind eye, both clarifying and constricting it. So more than being practically useful, the inclusion of walking times adds a much needed human dimension to this strange mesh of names and lines, providing the missing link between “tube London” and the complex, layered collection of overlapping stories, cultures and atmospheres that really make up this sprawling urban mass.

Still, it only tells a tiny percentage of the whole story, of walking in this city. On Friday I stood on a crowded Overground carriage, music in my ears, avoiding all eye contact with fellow passengers. I started to imagine a map where cross line walking times were added, between every single station; routes multiplying over each other in all directions, until the white of the background was entirely hidden, and the map was no longer flat but a three dimensional, fibrous birds nest of multi coloured strands.

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In acknowledgement of All Hallows Eve, I’m looking back at a walk, amongst London’s dead that inspired a chapter of my book: "Ways to Walk in London". Wandering through the Victorian monuments to the deceased in North West London’s Kensal Green Cemetery, was, in fact, a light hearted and happy experience. It was early in the days of my boyfriend Ross’s and my courtship. We laughed with joy when we stumbled upon a headless, moss covered stone horse and we laid cheap, purple flowers on our favourite tombs. The mausoleums and tombs in the style of ruined gothic cathedrals and greek temples are similar in scale to a garden shed or a wendy house, confuses the scale of your surroundings and creates the illusion of shrinking and growing in a “Alice in Wonderland” fashion as you weave through the graves. When I came to create the artwork for this chapter, I found myself drawing a landscape where dandelion clocks tower over the ruined abbeys, and where headstones stand at the same height as gasworks. Artwork from this chapter is now available to buy as a limited edition print from my shop.

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I am pleased to announce that signed copies of my book; "Ways to Walk in London"are now available to buy in my online shop. Limited edition prints of illustrations from the book are also available to buy. You can browse the selection here.

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The Soundtrack to a quiet but nicely cosey Autumn afternoon.

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Last week I walked in the woodland that make up Selwood Forest on the Somerset and Wiltshire borders. We walked through dripping mist with smeary shapes looming up before our eyes. In the evening by the fire I doodled inverse silhouettes of trees in my sketchbook.

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In celebration of National Poetry Day, I've illustrated a particular favourite. I entirely relate to the powerful sense of fleeting and poignant joy in an ordinary setting, that this poem depicts. The lines; "Bathes the serene, Foreheads of houses." resonate with a sense in me, that powerful emotions always colour my surroundings and become inseperable from them.

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The sun shines towards us diagonally on a balcony of the Hayward Gallery building. Against the wall sits a lonely bench. Bright green grass shoots up raggedly between the concrete slabs surrounding it.

We are on the Brutal Utopia tour of the Southbank. We walk through tunnels and cluster in lifts, through a multi dimensional maze, dotted with mysterious, antiquated machinery and incongruous, tasselled standing lamps.

We emerge onto the stage of The Purcell stage, facing out onto an audience of black leather seats. We cross the theatre to its rear exit, back into the matrix of geometric patterns. Then out into another unused public space, where rounded corners of windows meet angular, triangle shaped ceiling lamps.

Deep underground, we peer up through a chute designed to carry sound away from the concerts. I touch the wall the texture of Baltic Pine on my hand. We are at the heart of a geometric, grey hillside tumbling down into the brown river textured by the flesh of absent trees.

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Happy October one and all.

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A selection of autumnal, botanical drawings to honour the dawn of the fairest of the seasons.