In new ITV drama Innocent, David Collins (Lee Ingleby) returns from high-security prison to the coastal town where he lived seven years ago with his wife and children.

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Waiting for him is his brother Phil (Daniel Ryan), while his estranged children live nearby with their Aunt Alice (Hermione Norris).

The landscape is a vital part of Chris Lang's four-part drama – but where are the locations we see on screen?

Where is Innocent set?

At one point David refers to the place where they live as Hailsham, which is a town in East Sussex six miles from the coast.

Where is Innocent filmed?

Innocent on ITV

The small town in ITV's new series Innocent has been created with the help of two very different filming locations.

The ITV show was filmed both in Malahide in Ireland and on the South Downs in England.

Malahide is a coastal town 16km north of the city of Dublin. On filming in Ireland, Ingleby tells RadioTimes.com: "There was a nice place there, a seaside small village feel to it so we used a bit of that.

"We wanted to create that small place where everybody knows everybody, people know people's business. You can live relatively anonymously, but still everybody knows who you are and what you do and what you've done."

Other key scenes –including Phil's house and many of the aerial shots – were filmed on the South Downs, a range of chalk hills across the coast in the south-east of England.

Lee Ingleby in Innocent

"It's almost like a character itself isn't it? It has a very weird ambiance to it I think," Ingleby says.

Daniel Ryan, who stars as Phil, agrees. "It's not a fast story, but it's an immersive story," he says. "And it goes at what I always felt is the pace of that landscape.

"The pace of the piece sort of reminded me of the amount of time that has gone by with David Collins in a prison cell. It has to unravel at that speed because it's part of the landscape, it's part of the time it's taken to become a free man again."

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Innocent airs Monday 14th May – Thursday 17th May at 9pm on ITV


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