"In this second painting of a building site near Mornington Crescent the focus is on men at work; the large half-figure in the foreground with a spade; the figure on the right with a bin; other men beyond working in the yellow-ochre earth. The everyday activities of Londoners feature prominently in Kossoff's work, gradually developing into his so-called ‘crowd paintings' as his paintings grow in size and ambition over the coming decades. A number of gouaches, created at more or less the same time as his building-site paintings, illustrate this early interest; coalmen humping sacks along the road (coal was largely used to heat London houses at the time); people queuing in the rain by a coffee stall near St Paul's Cathedral (Syd's coffee stall in Calvert Avenue was a Shoreditch institution. It has recently entered the collections of the Museum of London see fig 14); young men and women listening to jazz at the 100 Club on Oxford Street; a tug-of-war on Hampstead Heath; and men at work on a building site close to St. Paul's Cathedral" (Text from Andrea Rose, "Leon Kossoff, Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings" Published by Modern Art Press, London, 2021, p.74)