Seems a nice, easy place to start. (Over-confident already.) These images give me a good idea of what I need to attempt. Let’s hope I can work it out.

The large image above is the truest colour, although the Lido bricks and mortar visible from Dulwich Road are variable, and the other two images show more of the darker bricks that are included.

TEST 1

Resources:

• Rowan Felted Tweed, shades 196 (Barn Red), 224 (Shadow) & 206 (Rose Quartz),
• Rico Essentials Organic Cotton, shade 18 (Silver Grey)
• 3.25mm knitting needles

I wanted to see if I could use stranded knitting and slip stitch simultaenously to mimic the irregular variegated bricks pattern. I think the result proves that it can work.

What needs to change:

• Mortar colour is too white, yellower colour needed
• Mortar yarn is too thick and the cotton strands split badly
• Brick pattern isn’t correct
• Colours perhaps too stark – although I’m not going for absolute realism

For Test 2:

• Find a yellower 4ply yarn for the mortar, avoiding cotton so the strands don’t split
• Maybe reduce the knitting needles to 3mm, to enable few more bricks in 18x18mm square
• Adjust brick pattern, with alternating rows of long and short bricks
• Perhaps introduce one more reddish shade of Felted Tweed, if there is one; it will all be used

A few ideas are beginning to gel for what I might aim to represent in the 49 blocks (7 x 7 squares, 18 x 18cm each). Some will fall by the wayside, others will present themselves. But I can see potential in everything listed here.

4 x Brockwell Park – four seasons, four corners

7 x iconic intarsia, from following:

• Escher mural (too complex?)
• The Florence (not much to distinguish)
• The Regent (need the new sign)
• Milton Road (angel/devil?, Paradise Lost)
• Shakespeare Road (the man himself – or skeleton in a hand, Hamlet)
• Spenser Road (Queen Elizabeth, the Faerie Queene)
• Chaucer Road (a pilgrim, Canterbury Tales)
• S Errington Wall advert

4 x buses

• 37
• 196
• 322
• 3

2 x zebra pattern (for crossings)

2 x iconic greenery:

• BLM
• Monkey puzzle tree

2 x details in white window surrounds

Other assorted:

• St Jude’s window detail
• Brockwell Lido bricks
• Brick fan over windows
• Grey house bricks
• Brockwell Lido window grille

19 Feb 26

I spent last year knitting Debbie Abrahams’ glorious Mystery Blanket for 2025, ‘The Seashore’ (https://www.ravelry.com/projects/patgsmith/mystery-blanket-2025). Inspired by her design process, the many techniques used in her blanket squares and the ways she uses them to express the world, I have a wild plan to spend the next year or so working towards a blanket that celebrates Dulwich Road in Herne Hill, south London.

I’m a total novice at this so in the course of discovery there will no doubt be a host of weird and embarrassing errors. But I will record early blanket planning and then the steps along the way to designing and executing (or failing to execute) each representational square.

This is a hostage to fortune, but let’s see what happens.