Three Billboards Outside Tin Brook, Stockport

Three Billboards Outside Tin Brook, Stockport. Andrew Liddle visits Stockport to meet the artist, Helen Clapcott.

Sounds a bit like the title for a surreal film! If it rings a bell faintly, it’s probably reminding you of the hit 2017 movie, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.

Now people are making pilgrimages to three increasingly famous billboards in Stockport, to see enlarged versions of original paintings by Helen Clapcott, who is to Stockport what Lowry is to Salford.

The staggeringly original idea to bring art to the community came during Lockdown when Helen was walking along Wellington Street and, just past Robinson's Brewery, saw the abandoned-looking billboards. “Suddenly the title of the film came into my mind,” she says. “It came to me that I could put those billboards to some use – to display Stockport’s immediate past on them.”

Helen is an artist working in tempera with a distinctive style entirely her own, immediately recognisable whenever you chance upon one of her wonderful paintings. She has, it seems, devoted the last forty years to painting Stockport in transition. Her pictures lovingly chronicle the Cheshire town’s changing face over that time, from smoky mill town to the modern makeover.

“I thought it would be a nice idea to give a kind of identity to an area in danger of being overpowered by Manchester,” she says of her current venture.

The Last of Stockport Paper Mill depicts the demolition of one of the great landmarks of the town, now replaced by a retail park. The Last Carnival, from 2018, captures the annual joyous advance through the town of people in colourful garb, floats, majorettes and bands. Dog and Tyres is real scene in which a little dog was left to guard a huge mound of tyres amongst disused derelict mills. Collectively they are part of the story of dereliction and abandonment that Helen has been painting almost all her adult life. The beauty of them now being in large format is that you can admire their detail, read them as narrative, appreciate them against a backdrop of reality.

Born in Blackpool in 1952, she came to Stockport as a young girl, returning some time after graduating from the Royal Academy, in 1978. There are obvious similarities with Lowry not least in palette, but it is buildings in a specific landscape that interest her rather more than people, vistas rather than human details, faded beauty rather than squalid ugliness. Her style owes more to Expressionism, she believes, and Edvard Munch and Chaim Soutine are two artists she most admires.

"Painting for me, is a kind of on-going exploration,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “They are a series of celebrations of a long walk, over a short distance, over a long time." Her oeuvre is nothing less than the narrative of her life and of Stockport’s over the same period. “There’s nothing nostalgic about them: although it appears I may be lamenting change, actually I’m just responding to what is there.”

Characteristically, she combines realistic close observation with the dramatic use of urban lighting, the foreground very often caught in the shafts of pale sun through the immense viaduct’s arches, the distance beyond filtered through a haze of power station pollution, fading to something rarefied beyond the hills, the overall effect slightly dreamy, almost spiritual. “I love to see the sun behind the viaduct,” she says, “it turns the shapes crisp but the shadows filter down to the ground and the light at the other side is just magical”.

To her Stockport is a visual feat. “ I still feel overpowered when I consider the red sandstone valley, the sun bouncing over the Cheshire plain, where two rivers meet and the Mersey begins.” She pauses to catch her breath. “It’s a skyline of chimneys, towers, and mills, stalked by demolition squads. There’s the iconic viaduct bridging the valley, the motorway snaking east and west through the middle of the town, and the power station that took a year to demolish."

It was when she learned to work in tempera, the application of egg-based emulsion on smooth panels that she felt she had found her ideal medium - which she has stayed with. “One of the qualities of tempera is that you can endlessly erase and repaint an area of the panel.” Part of the appeal, then, is it encourages precision and getting it exactly as she sees it. “My paintings are worked over months, altered, revised, and repainted.” It was at the Royal Academy that she perfected the painstaking technique.

She works tirelessly in a first-floor studio, overlooking the back garden of her Edwardian house in Macclesfield. Behind each painting is a mass of studies, “sketches, doodles and water colours taken from different angles”. The explanation of how she captures so many long views often from a high vantage point is part imagination and part her tendency to keep moving. “I don’t draw a single viewpoint. I keep moving on ten yards to collect another image. But I know the landscape, I’ve been walking it all my life. I’m right there in the midst of it when I’m painting.”

Many of them were researched at the eleventh hour as the wrecking balls and bulldozers moved in and she has often worked on building sites, sketchbook in hand, hard hat on head.

During the month of April you have a chance to see her work exhibited in the open air and, uniquely, in the context of where it was painted and the history it depicts. Don’t miss it.

Her Youtube video explains far more than can be expressed I words:




This is the first of an occasional series of articles on northern writers and artists, by Dr. Andrew Liddle, a highly-experienced freelance journalist and widely-published author of fiction, poetry and English textbooks.