Once a week, Helen Wilding assembles her crew of urban sketchers in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy to catch up before they scatter to draw.
While her friends chase ornate Victorian cast-iron lacework, moody alleyways, or let available seating nearby dictate what they capture, Wilding has her mission locked in. For seven years, she has been sketching every single building on Brunswick Street.
Her only decision? The lunch spot.
After two hours of pen scratches and quiet observation, the group gathers at her chosen spot.
This simple act sidesteps the agony of group indecision.
“I don’t like making decisions,” Wilding laughs. The same logic powers her massive project. With the whole street before her, she doesn’t choose what to draw. She just has to pick which part of it to capture.
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Brunswick Street pulses as Fitzroy’s main artery, the beating heart of Melbourne’s first suburb.
These late 1800s terraces carry layers of urban life: graffiti tags, faded ghost signs, and the endless cycle of businesses opening and closing.
Wilding captures it all with no revisions; everything apart from the tagging. From grand pubs to wacky signs to even uninspiring blocks that often get overlooked, she is drawing it all.
Wilding began this project in early 2019. Previously, she had drawn the street from the view looking down the street from her dad’s room at St Vincent’s Private on Victoria Parade, which she saw daily when visiting him.
She started at the Victoria Parade end, the vantage point she first drew from the hospital, and worked sequentially down the street. It took six months to reach Gertrude Street.
During one session, Wilding continued a drawing started years ago: the ordinary strip between Westgarth and Cecil. Its everyday blandness amused her. Part of finishing the full street, she said, meant sketching the “ugly” ones too.
“It’s not very exciting, but someone that lives in one of the buildings found it quite exciting I was drawing their building,” she said.
She’d completed the first building in this section and nearly finished the second prior. Working on it again, they appeared mismatched: the window signage had changed. Wilding didn’t mind.
“It’s a snapshot of time at the moment I drew it,” she said. “It is exactly accurate to the day I drew it, imperfectly accurate.”
Wilding has curbed her perfectionist tendencies, despite admitting she is one, by committing to pen sketches. Mistakes are constant, but she accepts them without fuss.
“Okay, it gets the gist,” she’ll say. She embraces the imperfection.
“If it was perfectly architecturally correct,” she says, “it’d be boring.”
Each piece demands ten hours of on-location pen drawing, broken up over the course of five weekly two-hour sessions, followed by another ten hours of painting at home.
Wilding chooses bold, saturated colors that aren’t always accurate but breathe new life into weathered brick. She favours rich hues over realism.
“People might say, ‘I don’t think that building is really that bright yellow,’ but it doesn’t matter,” she notes. “It’s about what brings me joy. I like saturated colours. Dull colours don’t interest me.”
Another thing that isn’t completely accurate is her signature “flattened impossible view” which brilliantly solves Brunswick St’s tricky gradient. She transforms the street’s subtle hill into a seamless panorama where every building sits on the same visual plane.
“You have to lift and drop elements,” she explains. “Otherwise, the doors end up falling off the page.”
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By day, Wilding works as a medical librarian, a role that contributes to her street documentation project. She dropped graphic design courses early, recognizing that professional art wasn’t her
path.
“I don’t think I was a person to be a professional artist; in fact, I think that would kill it for me,” she says. “I’m a librarian and researcher; this is the other part of my life.”
Her systematic approach to Brunswick Street channels the same impulses that drive her library work: structure, history, and comprehensive documentation. She dreams of eventually creating a
book that pairs her sketches with 150-year-old Trove advertisements and archival photos, weaving her personal observation with Melbourne’s documented past.
Her approach has evolved into something more dynamic as time has gone on. “Now I sort of do bits and pieces,” she explains, saying she usually starts one section, then the next week they
might head further up the street for variety before circling back to finish.
Sunlight and other elements help decide their position, shady side in summer, sunny side in winter.
Helen is always out there, no matter the weather. When the heat scorches or the cold bites, they find refuge indoors, where the architecture fuels their sketchbook.
Wilding has ridden the No.11 tram along Brunswick Street for 40 years and worked in Fitzroy for 20, but those early decades passed in a commuter blur. “Before it was more ‘this is the way to
get to work and to go into town,’” she recalls.
“I wasn’t really looking at what was outside the window.”
Travel rewired her vision. Hours spent sketching in overseas cafes while her patient husband read beside her, drawing sessions from Airbnb balconies, taught her to slow down and truly see
her surroundings.
“When I was travelling overseas, I was really looking at things and drawing,” she says, “then I came home and thought, well, actually this is pretty interesting. I had just never really looked at
it.”
Now Melbourne’s unique charm shines through her work. This city offers kilometre after kilometre of walkable Victorian architecture, cafes spilling directly onto pavements.
“It’s particularly Melbourne,” Wilding says.
Her ancestors walked these same streets in the late 1800s, past many of the same facades that she now documents. “I do feel there is a slight personal connection,” she admits.
Wilding’s vibrant home doubles as a studio and a gallery. Walls covered with finished pieces create a growing mosaic that tracks her progress through the street.
A lifelong sketcher, Wilding said she has always dreamed of one day drawing the entire street.
“I never thought I actually would,” she marvels at her longevity. “I wouldn’t have thought I would still be doing it.”
Seven years into this passion project, Wilding remains hooked. “It’s something that I still love,” she says.
“What I’m really surprised is that seven years in, I’m still not bored. I’m still finding the places interesting. I’m still finding new stuff all the time.”
The open-ended effort has no deadline. “It could take much longer,” she adds. “I’m in no rush.
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