For seven years, artist Helen Wilding has dedicated herself to a remarkable project: creating a hand-drawn record of every building along Melbourne's vibrant Brunswick Street. Perched on a small stool with her pens and paper, she estimates the ambitious endeavour could require another ten years to finish.
A Living Archive of Inner-City Melbourne
Each week, Wilding and a small group of fellow sketchers can be found on the pavements of Fitzroy, one of Melbourne's oldest suburbs. Their focus is the bustling, two-kilometre stretch of Brunswick Street, a thoroughfare famed for its eclectic mix of cafes, pubs, Victorian homes, churches, markets, and the legendary A1 Lebanese bakery. Wilding works on a long, accordion-folded strip of paper, patiently rendering shopfronts, architectural details, and street life, with each line drawing taking between four and six hours to complete.
"Sometimes you're sitting there and a truck comes and sits in front of you and won't move for two hours," Wilding remarks, describing the challenges of sketching on location amidst rumbling trams and city noise. Despite describing herself as an introvert, the project has fostered a community. Passersby, including tourists and local residents, often stop to chat. One building resident even shared the names they had given to the pigeons on the roof, which Wilding then incorporated into her sketch.
Capturing Change and Community
Wilding's work serves as a poignant historical document. Her sketches from the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns depict shuttered shops, signs for cancelled events, and references to Black Lives Matter protests. One drawing shows a friend standing across the road, the distance between them dictated by social distancing rules. The project also records the street's physical transformation; she made a special trip to sketch a colourful plant nursery gate before it was demolished to make way for an apartment block.
A librarian by profession, Wilding brings an incredible attention to detail to her art. She captures faded murals, individual bricks, and the changing colours of leaves. However, she deliberately excludes graffiti she considers vandalism, focusing instead on intentional street art. "There's heaps of things in these drawings that are wrong," she admits cheerfully, pointing out a mistake on a building's facade, "but they get lost in the details."
The Sketching Community Grows
The project has drawn others into its orbit. Alf Green, 85, now travels over an hour weekly to join the group. He began sketching a decade ago in a country town and was "sucked in" after finding Wilding's organised meetings. The sketchers often reconvene at lunch to share a meal, a drink, and discuss their work. For Wilding, what began as a travel activity—a way to truly "look up" and observe—has become a deep exploration of her own backyard. "I still feel like I don't know it that well," she says of the street she has travelled down for decades. "I still feel like I'm exploring."
After completing the intricate line drawings on-site, Wilding adds vivid, expressive colour at home, with a backlog of sketches waiting patiently in her cupboard, filed by street number. The scale of the undertaking is now clear to her. "It doesn't sound much, saying I'm going to draw an entire street," Helen Wilding reflects. "But it's a long project." Come rain or shine, change or development, she and her friends will be back on Brunswick Street next week, pens in hand, continuing their unique chronicle of Melbourne life.
