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The Art Show

George Shaw's family moved into Tile Hill in 1968, when he was just two years old. Walk round the estate with him, seeing through his eyes, and you pass through not only his private odyssey but a vanished era in Britain's social history.

Tile Hill was built after the war, as part of the nationwide programme to create a modern future. When the Shaws moved in it was new, indoor toilets were still a novelty and almost everyone worked at the car factory. 'On days when I was off school for some reason,' Shaw says, 'the place was so quiet that all you could hear were wood-pigeons and the occasional train in the distance.'

The big estate is open-plan, cut across by long paths and roads, and edged with woods, a remnant of what was once the Forest of Arden. Shaw remembers the woods vividly as 'this place on the edge of everything ... the sort of place you would go past and you would be sucked or dragged in ... maybe not even dragged ... maybe you just wouldn't come home for tea.' Other, more prosaic spots affected him just as strongly – walls where people gathered to smoke or to kiss, a line of garages with a gap you could slip through.

Brought up a Catholic, Shaw walked these geometrically laid-out streets with a strong awareness of death. At primary school he learned that when Christ died – at 3pm – the sky went dark, and today he often paints scenes in half-light. And the young Shaw was a frequent visitor to the local graveyard, even though it was a mile or two off. He has painted it several times, concentrating on the children's graves he used to stare at. 'I found it almost incomprehensible, as a child, that children could die.'

The most everyday places in Shaw's paintings – the bus shelter, a square of grass – seem imbued with emotion and significance. A picture of autumn trees is ambiguously titled The Fall. Outbuildings and a pub feature in a series called Scenes from the Passion.

The Tile Hill pictures now find ready buyers and hang in major galleries. Reviewers devote columns to the place, often quoting the poet Philip Larkin's line: 'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'

Shaw himself shows no sign of moving on. He remarks that he has come to haunt the places that once haunted him, and muses: 'You think of childhood as something you walk away from and you look back at it from a long way away. But I feel like ... I'm walking towards the past.'

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From the series, Scenes from the Passion by George Shaw
(Courtesy of George Shaw)

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