Painting London’s traffic jams

Peterborough-born artist Oliver Bevan has long been drawn to the urban landscape. He trained at London’s Royal College of Art – alongside David Hockney, no less – and many of his paintings look to London for inspiration. And what’s one eternal experience of life in the capital? Heavy traffic.

Bevan made nine large-scale canvases of traffic he saw in Hammersmith in the early 1990s. They were designed to hang closely together in a rectangular block. He said “there is no narrative intended” in these paintings “and the events shown are as much a mystery to me as they are to the spectator”.

In the painting below, the profile of a taxi driver is seen through their open car window. As the title suggests, they’re making slow progress through congested traffic.

Sitting downstairs on a double-decker bus, a passenger stares out of the window ahead. We can only speculate about their thoughts and feelings. Maybe they’re frustrated about being caught in a traffic jam.

This cyclist looks behind as they move away from the railings on the kerb, while pedestrians go about their daily business in the background. Bevan’s short brush strokes add a sense of movement to this brief and fleeting scene.

A Ford Sierra and its driver are pictured in front of a large traffic jam. Bevan’s use of abstract shapes in the background gives an impression of a mass of vehicles bumper-to-bumper. He says the paintings in this series “have a certain coolness, a balance between the expressiveness of paint and the remoteness of figures half-hidden behind glass”.

London roads are just as busy today as they were in the 1990s. Yes, the introduction of congestion charge in 2002 reduced the number of private cars by 15%. But the city’s growing population, increasing online shopping deliveries and new private hire services means London is as congested as ever. In 2024, drivers in the city spent an average of 101 hours stuck in traffic.