'Woolworths', 2012

A reminder: it's over a full decade since Woolworth's closed its stores across the UK - Deloitte closed all 807 Woolworth's stores between 27 December 2008, and 6 January 2009. Strange to think that such an institution has been off the high street for so long.

The painting shows the front of the store and how it looked in the year after closing. The entrance of the Sheffield shop in the painting reminds me of the Woolworth's store entrance in Blackpool, where I grew up, which also had a very particular 20th-century, clean modernist frontage.

The clean symmetry and bleached colour palette evoke feelings of classical architecture, but the closed shutters and feeling of abandonment echo the eerieness of the ruins that now exist of that self-same classical architecture. Very strange and very haunting. I mark this as the first of the victims of the high street due to the 2008 crash, which to my mind, continues to this day.

The painting has been in these shows :

• 2019, 'Uncertain Spaces: Kenopsia' a solo show at Cupola Contemporary Art Sheffield

• 2015, 'Overlooked' group show at the Scottish Queen, Park Hill, Sheffield