Anywhere else she'd make a fortune, but she's only interested in Stockport

Monet had water lilies, or a wind-battered pine beside the sun-struck Mediterranean sea in Antibes. Helen Clapcott has the A6, and all you can survey from the 192 bus.

She is proudly a one-town woman.

Bill Clark, the Hale-based, well respected art dealer, says: "If she went to London to paint she could make a fortune." But Helen doesn't want to.

She has built a career painting the place where she grew up, known for its railway viaduct, cotton spinning, and hat making - Stockport. Next month the town will stage a 100-piece retrospective of her work at the War Memorial Art Gallery.

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In his book 'A Northern School Revisited' Peter Davis says: "Like Lowry, Claptrott uses diminutive, ant-like figures whose psychological and physical distance instils a Fritz Lang type melancholia and alienation."

He then goes on to compare her with Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico, in that she uses "an eerie almost otherworldly light with long shadows". Her visions of the town's changing urban landscape do have the feel of an alien world while at the same time capturing its detail authentically.

Iconic landmarks - like the 27 archways of the 1840 Grade II listed Viaduct and the town hall as well as the M60 motorway, roundabouts, the River Mersey, infamous Pyramids, and modern industrial units - are her world. But she has also captured slow decline - a dog guarding a mountain of tyres in the yard of a semi-derelict mill, the demolition of a power station.

"As a kid I tended to be quite pleased with things I did. I liked playing on my own. Art and games were my favourite subjects at school and they were frowned upon as not being academic subjects and a way to go in the