‘It opened my eyes to the city’: the artist drawing every single pub in London
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- Lydia Wood launched what she calls "the pub project" in 2021 after losing her teaching job during Covid, then asked social media followers to nominate their favourite pubs and was surprised by the response
- Wood has drawn more than 350 of London's approximately 3,500 pubs in intricate pencil and estimates the full project will take at least 10 years to complete
- Her viral drawings have been collected in Locals: An Illustrated Ode to London's Pubs, published by Hodder and Stoughton, which features 60 of her pencil sketches — including a whole chapter on pubs called The Coach and Horses
- London's pub landscape has shrunk by roughly 1,000 pubs over the last 20 years, and Wood says she regularly receives messages begging her to draw a pub "before it gets demolished next year"
- Wood recently travelled to south Wimbledon to sketch the 150-year-old Trafalgar pub, which developers want to demolish for flats and where locals are campaigning to bring it under community ownership
- Her method is deliberately slow — each drawing takes anywhere from six hours to several days — and she sticks with pencil because, she says, it is "often underestimated as a tool"
Why it matters: With roughly 1,000 London pubs closed in the last 20 years and heritage sites like the 150-year-old Trafalgar facing demolition, Wood's pencil-by-pencil archive is functioning as an unofficial public record of buildings disappearing faster than they can be officially catalogued. The viral demand for her work — followers actively requesting sketches of threatened locals — signals that communities want this kind of documentation before it vanishes.
