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       Painting the Picture

      Undeniably, Edward Sheeran was a cute baby. The proof is in the many home movies his doting parents, John and Imogen, took of their second son as he crawled and gurgled, whooped and squealed around their first family home.

      The footage was used charmingly in the nostalgia-packed video that accompanied his 2014 ballad ‘Photograph’. While the sweet film had little to do with a melancholic lyric that declared how much ‘loving can hurt’, it provided a fascinating window on to his world.

      We see Ed grow from baby to small boy, with ginger hair, large blue NHS specs and a small port-wine stain near his left eye, to a teenager busking in the street while learning his craft and, finally, to the man acknowledging the applause of thousands at a pop festival.

      The large late-Victorian stone house that is the setting for many of the clips is not, however, in his beloved Suffolk, the county so closely associated with Ed, but in West Yorkshire where he was born, and where he spent his early years in the cosmopolitan market town of Hebden Bridge.

      John and Imogen Sheeran lived halfway up Birchcliffe Road, one of the steepest hills in the town and a lung-bursting trek from the centre for a young mum with a baby and a toddler. Their first child, Matthew Patrick, was born eight miles away in Halifax General Hospital not long after the couple had relocated from London. Edward Christopher followed just under two years later, on 17 February 1991.

      Calderdale, the valley in which Hebden Bridge sits, is ideal for bringing up a young family if you want to be sure of fresh air, spectacular countryside and wonderful walks. The road the Sheerans settled in winds its way to the crest of the hill where the views over the town and its distinctive streets of stone-built cottages are breathtaking.

      Everything about Hebden Bridge shouts character. The town, which takes its name from the old packhorse bridge across the River Hebden, has bundles of it – from the quirky craft shops, the organic restaurants and boutique cafés to the tall, narrow terraced houses that seem to cling to the hillside as if stuck there with glue. Recently, the town has featured as a location for the hit television series Last Tango in Halifax and Happy Valley.

      When Ed was born, the place was a work in progress – more basic and much less touristy than it is today. It had thrived as a bustling mill town specialising in corduroy and moleskin goods, but that prosperity ended in the 1970s when the textile industry went into decline. Hebden Bridge began to flourish again towards the end of that decade when it was transformed into a destination for creative minds and free spirits. It became well known for its strong sense of community and tolerance, in particular becoming a welcoming haven for lesbians and gay men.

      Local author Paul Barker explained, ‘It was a small mill town in steep decline. There were lots of squatters who had creative skills – writing, painting or music – so it started as an arts-based thing. It’s a tolerant place, which allowed this scene to develop. People came to visit friends and realised the freedom to be able to live how they wanted.’

      A strong literary connection already existed, although not a particularly happy one. The controversial poet laureate Ted Hughes was born in the village of Mytholmroyd, two miles down the road towards Halifax. His former home at Lumb Bank, two miles in the other direction, is now a residential writing centre.

      Of more interest to literary pilgrims is the grave of Hughes’s first wife, Sylvia Plath, in the village church in nearby Heptonstall, where his parents lived. She immortalised the location in her bleak poem ‘November Graveyard’ that spoke of ‘skinflint trees’. The revered American poet had tragically committed suicide in London in 1963 but Hughes arranged for her to be buried in this most picturesque of locations. Many devotees of her work wishing to pay their respects stay in Hebden Bridge.

      John and Imogen were drawn to the artistic nature of the town when they decided to settle there. Hebden Bridge was perfectly situated for a young and ambitious couple forging strong reputations in the world of art. They had begun promising careers in London where they were brought up in neighbouring districts south of the river – John in South Norwood and Imogen, a vivacious blonde, in Forest Hill. They were married in May 1984 at the historic Christ’s Chapel of Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift in the aptly named Gallery Road, Dulwich. He was twenty-six and she was twenty-four.

      John was always a man who grasped an opportunity, impatient to make something of his life. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he had been appointed keeper of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1980 at the age of twenty-three. He had been taken under the wing of the gallery’s charismatic first director, Giles Waterfield, and together they transformed its fortunes from a threadbare museum with a skeletal staff and no financial support into one respected throughout the world.

      Giles took a chance on his protégé’s youthful talent – as so many would with Ed in the future. When he died unexpectedly in November 2016,

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