Lydia Wood is on a mission to draw every pub in London and, in the process, she is creating an archive of an important part of the city’s nightlife. Photo / Ayesha Kazim, the New York Times
At 10.30am on a recent Wednesday in southeast London, artist Lydia Wood stood next to a dumpster and set up her easel.
She rubbed sunscreen on her neck and sized up her subject: The Lord Clyde, a pub in Southwark, just south of the river Thames, that was built in 1913.
Then, for an hour, she drew flat out, her eyes flicking between the tall, tiled boozer and her page.
“Oh wow, that’s so good!” said Emily Finch, 33, a passerby on an early lunch break.
“Thank you,” Wood replied. “I’ve got a long way to go.”
That was true in more ways than one.
Wood, 31, is on a mission to draw every pub in London.
She has completed about 300 and has about 2500 left, according to data on the city’s pubs from CGA by NIQ, a research consultancy.
The project has won her tens of thousands of social media followers.
It’s also given her a front seat to fears about the future of the city’s pubs, which are grappling with skyrocketing rents, noise complaints, the rise of the sober-curious and other pressures.
Finch said the Clyde had become a go-to because “a lot of my locals have closed down”.
That has led some to wonder whether Wood’s project is an ode, an archive, or, for the unluckier pubs, a requiem.
“What will be painful is seeing, by the time she starts and the time she finishes, how many have closed,” said Alistair von Lion, a pub historian and tour guide who runs a website called the London Pub Explorer.
Britain’s public houses are thought to have evolved from the wine bars — or tabernae — introduced by the Romans after they invaded some 2000 years ago.
These roadside inns became known as taverns and tended to serve more British-made ale than wine.
Over the centuries, the neighbourhood pub took on a vital community role in many towns and villages.
Today, it watches over first dates and post-work vents and break-ups.
It is a living room for friends whose apartments are too small to host a birthday party, a micro-stadium for a sports fan who can’t afford a season ticket and a kitchen table for the lonely and the too-tired-to-cook.
Wood, a self-described “pub person”, picks her subjects at random, zigzagging across the city on instinct and whim.
Even the unattractive ones have value, she notes. “To someone,” she said, musing in her studio, “the flat-roof, fringes-of-London kind of pub might be the most important place in the world.”
Wood, who drew through her childhood in London and then studied art at Goldsmiths, sees her project as a decades-long documentation — a life’s work, not a series of isolated sketches.
She tries to draw two to three a week, depending on the weather.
“I’m at the beginning of essentially a 30-year project,” she said, shading in a portion of brick and fixing a line with an eraser.
Wood taught art until the coronavirus pandemic. When her classes dried up, she began sketching pubs to make extra money and offered drawings for sale on social media in 2020 for £40 each ($90). The orders started flooding in, and friends started begging her to draw their local.
It was such a success that it became her full-time job.
She now charges about £380 ($858) for originals on A4 size paper, although prints are less than £50 ($113). She also sells pub calendars, which she pitches as a yearlong pub crawl.
Sometimes, she takes commissions, but not often: Every pub has its regulars, so her originals tend to sell quickly.
She spends at least a full day on each drawing, no matter how popular and beautiful — or how dingy and forgotten — that pub may be.
“I felt like kind of bringing them all on an even playing field,” she said. While she knows that many London pubs are facing trying times, she is most worried about “the really, really unspoken ones or the ones that people forget about — or certain people didn’t step foot in”.
Before the pandemic, there were more than 3000 pubs in London, according to CGA by NIQ. Now, there are about 2800.
The coronavirus hurt the entire night-time industry, as people got used to staying at home, ordering in and spending time on their phones instead of with other people.
And independent pubs were already facing extra pressures from rising rent and price competition from large pub chains.
“The economics are the primary issue,” said Michael Kill, chief executive of the Night Time Industries Association, a trade body.
As the price of a pint keeps rising, he said, people either have fewer drinks or drink cheaper supermarket beer at home, even if it is lonelier. “People have only got so much money in their pocket,” he said.
Outside the Clyde, a group of people had stopped to watch Wood as she completed her outline. Adam Colebrooke-Taylor, 60, a former firefighter turned fire instructor, struck up a conversation as he finished his early evening drink.
He said the pub had been loved by generations of London firefighters, who would come for a pint after learning at a nearby fire training centre, adding that the pub was part of “London Fire Brigade folklore”.
“Every firefighter went through here,” agreed his colleague, Naomi Simington, 47.
“I never thought I’d see her drawing one in real life,” said Iona Davidson, 22, who had recognised the artist by her signature red stool, a fixture of her videos.
Wood’s profile has risen in recent months. She had an exhibition of her drawings in January. Eight publishers bid on her book proposal in April. And her fans like to weigh in with ideas.
“I think I actually recommended that you draw this,” said Daniel Wright, a fan of her work, who noticed her as he was walking to get lunch.
“Did you?” she replied, looking up in delighted surprise. “Oh, well, thank you so much!”
Wright, 45, said he considers the Clyde — with its bustling patio, excellent craft beer selection and traditional interior — to be the “epitome of a London pub”. He’s also worried that rising living costs have driven people away from pubs.
“This is an archive of places that are really important,” he said, of her project. “All the conversations that matter happen in the pub,” he added. “They’re kind of little waypoints and signals in your memory.”
Wood smiled and kept working. She was racing the late-afternoon throng of happy drinkers, who would obscure her view of the details that make the Clyde unique.
By 6pm, her hand had started to cramp, and the pub had filled up. She flicked through the window boxes with deft, practised squiggles. She sketched in a pigeon who landed on the roof and cocked his head just so.
Then she put her pencil down and stepped back: “I’m happy with it,” she said. And she went in for a well-deserved pint.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Amelia Nierenberg
Photographs by: Ayesha Kazim
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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