He and Australian wife Jo wanted to take their daughters Ella, then 8, and Lucy, then 6, out of London but couldn’t agree where to live in England. Before moving to New Lambton the Dickinsons rented Jo’s late grandparents’ house in Waratah.

‘‘I didn’t come here because I fell in love with Australia, I came here because I wanted a change,’’ Dickinson admits.

‘‘I wanted to have a big change, a new chapter in my life and to give it a try. I didn’t want to regret not trying.’’

While Dickinson loved the idea of living close to the ocean, he found it difficult to adjust to the quiet. He was keeping busy teaching portfolio presentation in the graphic design department at TAFE at Tighes Hill and designing for Fred Bare and Mothercare – which still supplements his income – when he was asked to design the merchandise for The Rolling Stones’ 2002-03 world tour.

‘‘It’s just like another design job, but when you’re working with an icon like ‘the lips’ and I’m listening to the Rolling Stones all day trying to pick out lyrics to put onto T-shirts, it really makes a change,’’ he says.

But something was missing.

‘‘As soon as I started drawing Newcastle I kind of started feeling like ‘yeah, this is a really good thing to do’ because I still felt like I hadn’t really connected with Newcastle,’’ he says.

‘‘I lived here but I’d be sitting doing jobs for England, often listening to British radio, which I still do on the internet.

‘‘I wasn’t getting out or meeting people apart from the small group of friends I made, so this was a way of exercising by going out on my bike to look for locations.

‘‘I had no problem with it, I just missed England, I think.

‘‘And so this just made me feel kind of like I was participating in part of Newcastle.’’

Inspired by the comic book style of Robert Crumb – who withdrew from a planned appearance at this weekend’s Graphics 2011 festival at the Opera House after being labelled in a Sunday newspaper article as a ‘‘self-confessed sex pervert’’ – Dickinson started using techniques such as cross hatching.

His first drawing was on January 1, 2009, of the infamous ‘‘Men, do it longer!’’ billboard on Lambton Road at Broadmeadow.

‘‘I thought those ads were really funny when I first saw them,’’ he says. ‘‘I can see why a lot of people get offended by them. I just thought they were very Australian, just so blunt, like ‘we’re not mincing our words’.

‘‘They’re just so in your face and you can’t get away from them.’’

He later sat for 3 hours drawing the council administration building.

‘‘It felt so nice to do and I thought, ‘I want to do more of this’,’’ he says. ‘‘As I did more I got more obsessed with it and addicted to drawing.’’

Newcastle remains the common thread through his work, but there are subcategories of drawings.

Some are markedly un-British, such as signage, street pipes, lightposts, bus stops, a bin at Marketown and the Hunter School of the Performing Arts.

‘‘I’m picking things that feel slightly foreign, slightly different,’’ he says.

‘‘In doing that – not on purpose – but it turns out I’m doing quite Australian things, things that people take for granted or don’t notice.’’

Others are elements of scenes from ordinary life that, when isolated, are presented as extraordinary.

There is the Hunter Street bus stop near The Clarendon, powerlines bisecting tree foliage, a garbage bin at Braye Park, the happy house on Glebe Road, the House of Lasagna, Bob Jane T-Mart in Parry Street and the ‘‘big tap’’ on Lambton Road.

Icons including coal ships, The Obelisk and the Queens Wharf Tower sit alongside sentimental favourites Hamburger Haven and Super Hubert’s car.

Dickinson refuses to shy away from highlighting the urban decay that comes with living in a metropolitan city, with the Resistance Centre, the taxi headquarters in Hamilton and the former site of the visitor information centre on Hunter Street.

‘‘A lot of people will be drawing Newcastle but they’ll be drawing all the very positive aspects and the beaches and the brilliant things about it,’’ Dickinson says.

‘‘But for the people here, you know all that and I want to look at the urban city that we’re living in. It’s not just this happy seaside town that when you look out at the ocean you see dolphins and whales, you could easily do that and it does have that, but step back and scratch the surface and there is this urban decay going on.’’

But it is his cheeky sense of humour that blankets much of his work. ‘‘Sometimes I feel like I’m running out of things, but I go for a cycle ride and it’s just stuff I find amusing or different or makes me laugh,’’ he says.

Some of his most amusing drawings are of items that are temporary, including a sign outside Subway at Mayfield.

‘‘I thought it was funny,’’ he laughs.

‘‘I just liked what it said and how it said it.’’

One of his most popular drawings is of the sign to Mayfield, which labels it a suburb ‘‘worth visiting’’.

‘‘Worth visiting? That’s the best thing they could say about Mayfield? Don’t stay there or don’t live there, but it’s worth visiting?’’

Any initial concern about offending Novocastrians has proven unfounded.

‘‘I was a bit worried, but it turned out people embraced it and they laughed,’’ he says.

‘‘That’s the best reaction I can get is people looking at them and laughing because they’re finding things funny that I found funny as well.

‘‘I like the fact people are understanding it, getting it that I’m not taking the piss out of the place, I’m reflecting it.’’

Much of the artwork’s appeal lies in its ability to give a gentle ribbing, while presenting observations from the outside that help Novocastrians reshape the way they see theircity.

‘‘And that’s what I hope for,’’ Dickinson says.

‘‘I think art can be about making people aware, opening their eyes to something.

‘‘It’s not just about the picture, it’s about walking along and opening your eyes in your own town and not taking things for granted.

‘‘It’s so easy to do, you get so wrapped up in what you do every day and walk down the street 100 times and it might only be when you come across a drawing of something you’ve passed every day that you might realise ‘oh!’.’

Dickinson considered showcasing his drawings in a colouring-in book before he stumbled across Susy Pow’s Bird In The Hand zine shop.

‘‘Nowadays you have the technology to produce it by yourself,’’ he says.

‘‘You don’t make much money, but you’re getting it out of the sketchbook.

‘‘People are seeing my drawings, it gives it a point.’’

Initially he intended to produce the collectable-style zines for the United States and so decided to label his drawings as Newcastle, ‘‘the capital of Australia’’.

‘‘I thought they wouldn’t know any better,’’ he says.

He publishes an issue of Newcastle, Australia each time he finishes a collection of drawings.

There are now seven issues – the first having sold 300 copies – as well as the Newcastle Annual 2011.

His company, Newcastle Productions, also has a range of 30 greeting cards and five hand-printed tea towels, which have proven popular to send overseas as gifts.

Sales of the range at Lake Macquarie Art Gallery and Honeybee on Darby Street (with the exception of prints, which Dickinson sells online and at markets) and the zines at MacLeans Booksellers have been steady, covering material costs and providing a little pocket money.

And it’s not over yet.

The range of more than 100 drawings was recently complemented with the 100 Letterboxes of Newcastle collection.

As a former paperboy who delivered mail through slots in doors, Dickinson is fascinated with the city’s letterboxes, which he says have individual characters and personalities.

‘‘If you look at the 100 there are some elements on some of them that are the same. They might have the same basic box, but the stands!

‘‘Some are made of metal, some are made of concrete, some are made of wood, some are stone, some are built like big barbecues and obviously being a steel town you have a lot of elaborate wrought iron ones that are slightly decaying now.’’

In May 2010 he started photographing letterboxes ‘‘or else I’d be sitting in people’s front gardens’’ to draw.

(His wife and daughters refused to accompany him on his missions.)

‘‘There are so many streets that there’s no reason to go down unless you live there, so in doing this I got the map and specifically went to places I hadn’t yet trawled,’’ he says.

‘‘It was quite exciting as well, it’s like fishing because towards the end I’d be quite desperate for specific numbers to make the set. I’d be going along and just specifically searching for a number 88.

‘‘I’d have a list of numbers that were left and I’d be collecting them like a trainspotter.’’

Numbers 88 and 5 remain among his favourites.

A collection of eight letterboxes featured on a paste-up mural in Newcomen Street as part of last year’s This is Not Art festival.

The entire project was included in his March 2011 exhibition at The Lock-Up.

He was commissioned in April this year to paint a mural of Newcastle Ocean Baths on the wall of The Lucky Country Hotel in Hunter Street.

Despite the positive response, Dickinson was apprehensive about tackling the Newcastle Beach tunnel project in July.

Artist Birgitte Hansen had not enjoyed painting the mural that had covered the tunnel for the previous 21 years.

‘‘She covered up the ends of the tunnel so people wouldn’t walk through and she wasn’t getting disturbed,’’ he says. ‘‘But once I was there for a couple of days I loved it.

‘‘Being by the ocean, seeing whales and just actually feeling like I was working in the open air by the beach for five weeks, it was absolutely brilliant. If my mural stays there for 21 years – or even 10 years – I’d be happy.’’

Dickinson continues to list and photograph places he would like to draw someday, including a solicitor’s building on Tudor Street and scenes on his daily walk in New Lambton.

His etchings of Newcastle Ocean Baths and Merewether Ocean Baths have proven to be the most commercially successful but he has no aims to create a ‘‘Ken Done-style business’’.

Instead he thrives on the challenge to uncover more ‘‘odd spots’’ to depict in future issues of his zine. He dreams of one day travelling around Australia in a campervan to capture the essence of other cities.

‘‘But I feel really loyal to drawing Newcastle,’’ he says with a wry smile. ‘‘It feels like now if I draw something else, it will feel like being unfaithful. Doing this has made me feel so much at home here, that’s been a really good thing out of it all.

‘‘It’s hard to put my finger on it, but I think everything I love about this city is in the drawings.’’

Dickinson’s work is on show today and tomorrow from noon to 6pm at Look See 2011, Watt Space Gallery, University House, corner Auckland and King streets Newcastle. Visit trevordickinson.com.au.