The Bell Inn at St Olaves

There is a specific stillness that settles over the water outside The Bell Inn at St Olaves. As Broadland’s oldest recorded inn, the building carries a weight of time that you can feel when you look at it from across the river. In this 12″ x 8″ watercolour, my main focus wasn’t just capturing the architecture, but rather the relationship between the old brickwork and the fluid nature of the water and the surrounding greenery.

Watercolour requires a balance between control and letting the medium find its own way. For the trees rising behind the inn, I allowed the greens and deep indigos to bleed into one another on wet paper, creating a soft, dense backdrop that pushes the structure forward. The building itself is grounded with loose ink linework, defining the windows and the pitch of the roof without becoming rigid.

Down in the foreground, the boat moored by the bank acts as a quiet anchor for the composition. I kept the water simple with broad, horizontal washes, letting the white of the paper suggest the light reflecting off the surface. It is a familiar, enduring pocket of the Norfolk and Suffolk border, captured on an ordinary afternoon.