New End

A cold cold day in Hampstead

I painted this view sitting in New End on a bitterly cold January day in 2018, looking towards Streatley Place with the old Boiler House chimney rising behind.

What drew me to this corner of Hampstead was the layered complexity of the buildings - that warm terracotta block in the middle ground against the pale, almost ghostly facades behind it, and the Victorian industrial chimney anchoring the whole composition. The cold affected the way the watercolor behaved, which you can see in some of the washes, but there's something about painting in winter that strips away the picturesque and shows you the actual bones of a place.

I love these overlooked views in Hampstead - not the famous spots everyone photographs, but the working corners where different eras of London architecture stack up against each other. The challenge was keeping my hands steady enough to handle the brush while catching that particular quality of thin winter light.