A couple of weeks ago I managed to have a day out and part of that was to visit Dorchester on Thames, which is about 10 miles south of Oxford. Dorchester on Thames is probably best known for its Abbey but it also has a fine collection of old houses and buildings, amongst them is the old coaching inn – The George Hotel, below.

This is a fine old establishment and a good place to stop for lunch if you happen to be in the area. My visit however was just to sit and draw the frontage, luckily finding a gap in the parked cars to settle down and do some drawing.

It is a bit of a thing nowadays – that these picturesque towns and villages can be affected by what I call ‘car-blight’ – that is usually a High Street or Main Street where there are so many cars packed in that it starts to obscure the actual town. This tends to be something you notice more if you are doing some urban drawing or indeed even just trying to get a decent photograph. Dorchester is by no means a particularly bad example of too many cars – somewhere like Burford can be much more like a sea of cars on a busy day. So, my apologies – enough of that particular rant.

When I visited I got lucky, the town was relatively quiet and the few passing pedestrians polite and unobtrusive – again while probably looking for a nice place to have lunch.

The above is the view that I settled down to draw and below are a couple of photos of my drawing in situ.

The start of my post is the resulting drawing but I did also do some watercolouring of my sketch, to produce the illustration below.