6th November 2023
Listen
Listen
The 2025 Liverpool Literary Festival introduced me to two things, a range of created voices across the student body, and the chance to step into 1980s Liverpool through the eyes of multi-award winning director, writer and double BAFTA nominee Chris Shepherd. Taking us through his own journey as an artist, from Claymation short stories to feature films and best sellers, Shepherd presented his new graphic novel Anfield Road: A Story of Coming of Age in 1980s Liverpool.
Written and illustrated by Shepherd, follows its central character teenage Connor Stirling’s world growing up on Anfield road during Thatcher’s Britain. Except Connor is not a football fan; he has big dreams of being an artist and leaving Liverpool to study at the London College of Painting. As he navigates life, love and the decision of whether to leave or stay, Shepherd introduces us to a version of the city that springs from his own nostalgia, finding a unique poetry and colour within familiar urban landscapes.
Each page is a work of art, with the city itself emerging as a character in its own right; full of wit, humour, occasionally harsh and yet with a talent for finding the fantastic in amongst the ordinary. Intent on accuracy, it was initially a “different beast”, written as a script. However Shepherd but soon found that to do it justice there needed to be images. These indeed speak for themselves; monochromatic scenes are met with bursts of colour, reflecting Connor’s shifting love-hate relationship with the city. These contrasts help us understand the emotional texture of growing up; moments of frustration and confinement set against flashes of beauty, hope and belonging.
“Eighties TV and press often showed the North as a bleak place. But I always wanted to show the beauty of barren landscapes. The rising sun cutting across burnt out cars always took my breath away. For me this beauty is pure poetry. I’d always be trying to capture this world with my camera or making films”.
Although many of the spaces depicted around the city are now lost in time, Shepherd includes hidden gems and familiar spots interwoven with the storyline; from The Grapes, Stanley Park Palm House (now the Isla Gladstone Conservatory), to Lime Street Station, there are recognisable places to be found within the pages, that remain firmly embedded in the landscape since the 80s. As its very own memory map, Anfield Road remembers Liverpool vividly, and true to Shepherd’s claim that the city that stays “in your blood” once you have lived here.
Reflecting on his own childhood, Shepherd explained that when growing up there was little in terms of true representation of Liverpool. Too often overlooked or reduced to stereotype, his first memory of seeing Liverpool represented in a way that felt true to home, was that of Willy Russell’s Our Day Out. Here was a piece of art that allowed warmth, humour and the lived experience of adolescence in the city to shine through. Shepherd uses Anfield Road in the same way; as a celebration of falling in love with the city and finding a sense of home here, just as many of us do as students.
Shepherd’s final message was a call to creativity, pushing the fact that “there is inspiration everywhere“; that stories can be told wherever, and in “whatever mediums available“. Get your hands on a copy if possible!
