interview with painter George Shaw

"It was – there's no other way to put it – a nice place to grow up," Shaw says, when we settle in his local on Ilfracombe's main street over Guinness and cottage pie before an open fire. "A postwar council estate on the edge of Coventry, with trees, grass and loads of woodland just beyond. The last built-up area before the countryside took over. I don't think it has ever left me, that sense of possibility and familiarity and possible danger lurking out there somewhere beyond. I haunted the place and now it haunts me."