Crouch End cartoonist sells work in aid of allotments

Approaching 80, he has sorted through decades of artwork to raise money for the allotments he joined more than 20 years ago.

Original cartoons for The Observer, Evening Standard, Sunday Times and New York Times can be seen at his one man show at Original Gallery at Hornsey Library.

The drawings, watercolours and acrylics on sale also feature local landscapes and travel scenes that will benefit the community of gardeners at Shepherds Hill allotments.As well as his cartoon work Peter will be showing drawings of his allotment and travels around the world. (Image: Peter Till)

“In high winds a tree fell on our trading shed where we buy in supplies of fertiliser and compost,” said the Crouch End cartoonist.

“The whole site needs maintenance, of fences or places where youths break in and have secret parties.

“There’s a fantastic community there, we have a monthly gardeners’ question time, and a lunch where people make soup, bread and cakes. It’s all very jolly.

“It’s also an enormous inspiration, I’m often wandering around with a sketchbook doing watercolours or on the spot pen and ink drawings.”

Crouch End cartoonist Peter Till is holding a solo show selling work in aid of the Shepherds Hill allotments. (Image: Courtesy of Peter Till) The Manchester-born artist studied English at Cambridge before moving to London where in 1969 he touted his portfolio to Oz Magazine and Time Out.

“I had always drawn, my father was a commercial artist, and when I came down from Cambridge I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he says.

“They bought stuff straight out of my portfolio, and that sort of took over.”

Peter has also designed a series of stamps for Royal Mail based on inventors and inventions. (Image: Peter Till) His career has ranged from playing in a band, making an animated film with fellow artist Ian Emes, and spending nine months in New York filing for major titles.

“I lived in the YMCA the whole time,” he says. “I didn’t know anyone but I knocked on doors, took around my portfolio, and got work, which made an enormous difference to my career.”

Peter supplied cartoons for The Guardian for many years. (Image: Peter Till) He has also designed eight stamps of inventors for the Royal Mail.

Recalling his weekly cartoon for The Guardian he says: “I would get to speak to the writer at 1pm and have to finish the drawing by 5pm. It was before digital so I would get on my bike and cycle down to The Guardian to drop it off.”

Sometimes his job was to “make a boring or arcane financial thing more interesting”.

“These things, like Brexit or the Middle East, run for weeks and you have to ring the changes in the same story. I used to do the cartoon for Jonathan Freedland’s column who had an interest in the Middle East – I had to think of different ways to draw the negotiating table.”

“My absolute worst fear,” he confesses, “was that they would leave a little hole in the paper and a note ‘this is due to Peter Till’s inability to come up with an idea’.”

At other times he had to respond to an unfolding historical moment.

His cartoon of Uncle Sam with an aeroplane flying into his chest and smoke billowing from his hat was drawn on 9/11.

“I was doing a cartoon for the op-ed page and the writer had told me what he was going to do but I had the TV on, saw those amazing images, and knew they would want that instead.

“You had to come up with something on the spur of the moment for a world-changing event that was still happening.”

Peter says his body of work is very varied: “It’s hard to believe they were all done by the same person, but the question is what do you do with it?

“I am trying to reduce my enormous archive. I have given a lot to The Guardian and the V&A took some stuff but there’s still a huge amount – mostly unframed.

“I am exhibiting a lot of it on washing lines and in plastic bags!”

Peter Till’s show runs at The Original Gallery at Hornsey Library from April 10-15 with proceeds going to the Shepherds Hill Allotments.