20 x 20 cm, acrylic on canvas panel.
This picture shows Lower Mall, by the Thames in the London area of Hammersmith. The annual Universities Boat Race passes by here. William Morris, socialist, designer and author (1834-96) lived nearby in Kelmscott House, which is now the home of the William Morris Society. All this riverside tranquility is at a short distance from noisy, traffic-heavy Hammersmith town centre, on the other side of the A4.
Where the viewer is standing, used to be Hammersmith Creek, a bustling wharf area where the Stamford Brook joined the Thames; once it was known as Little Wapping for its industry and squalor. “It was my good luck only,” wrote Morris in 1881, “of being born respectable and rich that has put me on this side of the window among delightful books and lovely works of art, and not on the other side and the empty street, the drink-steeped liquor-shops, the foul and degraded lodgings.” In 1936 the Brook was culverted and the area landscaped as Furnivall Gardens. Also nearby is the former Doves Press, set up by Thomas Cobden-Sanderson in 1900.
In the middle of the picture we see the Dove public house – built in the early 18th century and a pub since at least 1796 when Fullers Brewery took it on. The Dove is the only pub on that stretch of river to have a terrace directly onto the riverside (the rest – the Black Lion, the Old Ship, the Rutland and the Blue Anchor – sit the other side of the riverside path). The Dove has the smallest bar in the UK – the second bar, separated from the main bar apparently because of a misunderstanding around licensing rules in the 1910s.
I lived in nearby West Kensington for many years and often walked along the riverside and went into the pubs, mostly the Blue Anchor and the Dove. The painting is based on a photograph I took some time in the closing years of the last century. I painted it before, one recently (above: 18 x 24 cm, acrylic) and first in 2018:
About the Dove and its small bar
Chris Amies art 
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