Park sketching

It was a glorious day in Greenwich Park last week, and the green slope that unfolds from the Observatory was full of people busy lying down doing nothing. Above them tourists were taking pictures with their mobiles. Not of the people doing nothing but of the breathtaking view. The Park, the Queen's House and the Maritime Museum at the bottom, the Naval College, then the bend of the river, then Docklands and then East London which as everyone knows extends to the end of the world.
I was more interested in the people doing nothing instead, although I had to have a go at sketching the view of course.

After the park experience I proceeded to draw something that I've had in mind to draw for a few years, the entrance to the Queen Mary Building of Trinity College (formerly Naval College, originally Greenwich Hospital, built by Sir Christopher Wren) on the riverside of the building. The entrance leads to a Courtyard that has an exit at the opposite end. A shadow cuts the courtyard diagonally and a small piece of sky can be seen under the arch of the entrance.
Sounds simple, well in my experience it isn't. Maybe because of the classic proportions that if you don't get enough right look bad when you look again at the original, or maybe because drawing one thing into another and another one again into it confused me, but I never thought that such a seemingly simple arrangement of geometric shapes could be so hard to get right. I only managed to do a preparatory study and I really need to go back and give it the time it deserves (regardeless of whether I deserve that time to go back).