Hello and a warm welcome to my blog, where you see what goes on behind my primary website Drawing the Street.

My name is Ronnie Cruwys and I love to draw, especially full length architectural scenes of our great British high streets.  The faces of our towns are changing so quickly.  My drawings are often out of date as soon as they are published as familiar businesses close their doors and board up their windows. I draw these as lively but accurate records of the streets as I see them at present and hope they will be read as histories in future.

By drawing the street from a wider perspective, I hope to share what I see is the inherent beauty alongside the flaws which all add up to form the town’s identity.

I use this blog to share what is fresh on the drawing board as well as to share some of the sketches and work behind the scenes.

I also host a sister blog, www.drawingthedetail.com which forms an archive of all the streets in smaller, easy to open images. I welcome input from readers with their own historical insights to the buildings which I have drawn. Over the last five years, this is gradually  becoming a living, growing public archive.

The foundations for Drawing the Street were laid with ‘Ironmarket in Winter’ a 2.3 m long drawing which went on to form the centrepiece of an exhibition in Newcastle-under-Lyme Library in November 2013.  Given the enthusiastic public response to the drawing, I donated it to Newcastle library.  In March 2018, The Brampton Museum purchased the entire set of Newcastle drawings as part of their permanent collection, where they also stock limited edition prints of the work.