Urban Sketchers at Mile End Park

To my shame I had never heard of either Mile End Park or the Urban Sketchers but, thanks to sketcher extraordinaire, Alison Gardiner who sketched the musicians at the Highgate Society concert a few weeks ago – I was introduced to both on Sunday.

The park stretches from the bottom of Victoria Park in Hackney down to the river – you can see Canary Wharf in the distance – and it has a splendid Art Pavilion which envelops a curvaceous pond with a fine collection of swans, ducks, moorhens, waterlilies, reeds and bulrushes..

Urban Sketchers are loosely linked groups of amateur sketchers – first operating in Seattle but now all over the world – who enjoy sketching urban landscapes either alone or in groups. The London group meets up once a month or so, spends a few hours sketching and then compares notes. On Sunday they were having a sketching meet up –

but were also celebrating their first ever exhibition (the London group has only been going for 10 years) here in the Art Pavilion at Mile End. The exhibition was if full swing when I got there – but so were Sunday’s sketchers, both inside and outside the pavilion!

The walls were lined with sketches most of which were for sale for somewhere between £30 and £300 –

many of which I would happily have purchased had I had any wall room left! Just to give you a very slight flavour, this was one of Alison’s –

– this was a quirky view of Hampstead Heath –

and this was a trio of I am not quite sure where…

Meanwhile, outside the pavilion the birds were enjoying the glorious October sun and showing very little interest in the artists busily recording their doings for posterity.

If you want to know more, check in to the Urban Sketchers website – or buy their new book!

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