Detail from INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE (1955), by L. S. Lowry (Courtesy of Tate Gallery and Art Resource)

y students often come to my classes holding particular images of Britain gleaned from watching Masterpiece Theatre, from being immersed in the world of "Upstairs Downstairs" or "Brideshead Revisited," or more recently from luxuriating in the sumptuous world concocted by the film industry in its endless remakes of novels by Jane Austen. These are the images that constitute England and Englishness, that define the nation's heritage and that are harnessed by the tourist industry to lure dollars and yen and marks to bolster the island's economy. After Shakespeare, the obligatory visit to Stratford; after Wordsworth, Windermere, and the rest of the Lake District; or perhaps, moving further down the canonical list, after A. E. Housman the stroll through the undulating Shropshire countryside, punctuated by afternoon tea in an idyllic village and indulgent gasps at the quaintness of the local parish church.

But this image of the nation, merchandized as a green and pleasant land, vies with another heritage, that of the industrial revolution. Not only was Britain the first country fully to undergo the seismic transformations brought about by that revolution, but in the 1870s it even invented the term, a category through which to make sense of those massive changes in everyday life. It was the first, also, to generate an urban working class, with its own culture and unique way of life, a phenomenon studied avidly by Marx and Engels and out of which they generated their predictions about the future of humankind.

Most of the industry is now gone. As late as 1945, with a population of roughly forty-seven million, Britain still boasted over a million textile workers and a million coal miners. Both industries have been decimated since the war. Today there are less than thirty thousand miners, and Britain's industrial past has become another commodity that has been codified, sentimentalized, and packaged for popular consumption by the burgeoning heritage industry. In the process, a considerable amount of nostalgia has been generated for the nation's traditional industries, and for the practices of everyday life associated with them.

COMING FROM THE MILL, by L.S. Lowry, 1930 (Courtesy of City of Salford Museums and Art Gallery)

t is useful to consider these issues by beginning with some ideas raised by the British historian, Carolyn Steedman, in her book, Landscape for a Good Woman, one of those rare works that compels the reader to think in entirely new ways. Steedman offers a story of two lives, recounting her own childhood in South London in the 1950s and her mother's in a town in the industrial north in the 1930s. Though the book may appear to be a familiar autobiographical study, it illuminates what historians have done--and might do--with accounts of ordinary lives. It also raises a number of issues about the relationship between memory and desire, and between the shifting practices of everyday life and the postwar politics of nostalgia.

The 1950s and 1960s in Britain are fruitful years for considering these questions because it was then that many so-called "traditional" working-class communities--in which women like Steedman's mother lived--were bulldozed in the name of progress, disrupting stable patterns of social life. This was accompanied both by a desire for the promises of a wholly new kind of society and nostalgia for a fast-vanishing world. This essay examines the desire to memorialize the working-class past that emerged in these years, the consolidation of the industrial north of England as a site for popular remembrance, and the contribution made to this process by the work of the foremost artist of northern industrial life, Lawrence Stephen Lowry, who was born in 1887 and who died in 1976.

There is one particularly moving scene in Landscape for a Good Woman in which Steed-man recounts a visit she paid to her mother two weeks before her mother's death. "As I went out," she writes, "I saw hanging over the mantlepiece a Lowry reproduction that hadn't been there on my last visit." Pondering this recent acquisition, Steedman asks herself, "Why did she go out and buy that obvious representation of a landscape she wanted to escape?" Answering her own question, Steedman quotes the art critic John Berger's analysis of the characters who stalk Lowry's world: "They know each other, recognise each other .  .  . ; they are fellow travelers through a life which is impervious to most of their choices." Steedman's mother might indeed have found in Lowry's paintings a means of identifying with those "fellow travelers" with whom she had shared a life of grueling hardship. But does this adequately explain why she, and many, many thousands like her, purchased cheap reproductions of Lowry's paintings in the 1950s and 1960s, consolidating his status as one of the most popular artists in postwar Britain?

Relatively unknown outside his native Lancashire before the 1940s, Lowry now enjoys a central space in the national imagination. His paintings have come to symbolize "the North" and everyday life in the traditional working-class community. They depict a world we have lost, although as Philip Dodd reminds us it is a world that has been rendered familiar by Lowry and frozen in the mold of a Lowry painting. "'The North,'" he writes, "is less a number of particular places with specific histories than a Lowryscape, a settled place with an agreed iconography." Since the war, the representation of Britain's industrial past as a "Lowryscape" has become ubiquitous. The Pelican edition of Richard Hoggart's classic lament for the lost life of the working-class past, The Uses of Literacy, is graced with a Lowry, as is A Local Habitation, the first volume of Hoggart's autobiography, which reproduces Lowry's 1936 canvas, "The Doctor's Surgery." More recently, the cover of an issue of History Today, devoted to Britain's industrial rise and fall, includes Lowry's famous painting, "Coming from the Mill," which he completed in 1930. An altered version of this canvas recently framed a discussion in The Guardian of Manchester's bid for the 1996 Olympic Games, accompanied by the caption, "And will Olympia be builded here among the dark satanic mills?" Lowry's paintings have come both to signify the North and to play a role in fueling and giving shape to the nation's postwar nostalgia for its working-class past, a process that can best be understood by turning first of all to Lowry's life and rise to fame.

owry was born in 1887, the only son of stalwart members of the lower middle class who moved from Manchester to one of its industrial suburbs when he was a boy. In 1904, he gained employment as a clerk and in 1910 he joined the Pall Mall Property Company as a rent collector, a job that took him to the poorer districts of the region. Although he began to study art in his spare time, enrolling in the Salford School of Art, Lowry remained with the Pall Mall for forty-two years. Put forward as a working-class artist, Lowry was, in fact, a white-collar worker, a voyeur of everyday life in the North who knew the local community but was not part of it. Familiar with, and yet mostly excluded from, the world he painted, Lowry positioned himself in his canvases as an outsider peering in. By the 1950s and 1960s, many of his admirers found themselves in a similar position; like Carolyn Steedman's mother, they had been severed from that world and were now able to view it only from a distance.

It was after joining the Pall Mall that Lowry was inspired to paint what he termed the "industrial scene," an event on which his biographers have lavished attention. There are several stories about his conversion, but the one Lowry encouraged had to do with an experience that followed missing a train. "It would be about four o'clock," he recalled, "and perhaps there was some peculiar condition of the atmosphere. . . . But as I got up to the top of the steps I saw the Acme mill, a great square red block with little cottages running in rows right up to it--and suddenly I knew what I had to paint." Lowry's discovery of "beauty in the smoke" of industrial Lancashire may have marked a seminal moment in his own life; it certainly assumed monumental proportions in the stories told about him by others. Most of those stories, however, did not circulate until after Lowry had become famous and after widespread interest had been generated in the environment he painted.

Although Lowry completed some of his most famous works in the 1920s--"An Accident" (1926), "Coming Out of School" (1927), and "A Removal" (1928)--he failed to attract much interest. Then in the 1930s, some local towns began to acquire his works. The Salford Art Gallery collected them in earnest, a local reporter claiming that they conveyed "with remarkable truthfulness of expression the everyday life which we are accustomed to seeing in the city." His road to national celebrity, however, only really began in 1939, after he had been exhibited in a one-man show in a London gallery and praised by Eric Newton, the art critic of the Sunday Times, and John Rothenstein, another Northerner and director of the Tate Gallery from 1938 to 1964.

During the war, his reputation grew. Lowry was asked by the state-sponsored War Artists' Advisory Committee to undertake a few industrial scenes for the Ministry of Information, part of its attempt to generate social cohesion by harnessing the working class to the war effort. But the Committee was disappointed; Lowry seemed more interested in recording his experience as a fire warden--as in his 1942 work, "Blitzed Site." Yet the fascination with the everyday life of the North that had been evident in the documentary film movement in the 1930s grew significantly during "the people's war," fueling the popularity of Lowry's representations of that life. The war thus accelerated Lowry's rise to fame, and in 1945 he was awarded an honorary degree by Manchester University, introduced as an artist who conveyed "the essential truth about the Lancashire scene and Lancashire people," whose work, it was claimed, conferred "beauty on the seemingly unattractive."

By 1950, thirty-seven paintings by Lowry hung in public galleries in Britain (and one in the Museum of Modern Art in New York), a figure that had tripled a decade later. After thirty years of relative obscurity, Lowry now became a celebrity. Although the industrial world he painted was in decline, the demand for his studies of that world became incessant. "The blighters keep asking for more," he complained. Lowry obliged, completing works each entitled "Industrial Landscape" in 1952, 1953, and 1955.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Lowry's fame grew and grew. Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister, was a devoted fan, offering him a knighthood and choosing "The Skaters" for his official Christmas card in 1964 and "The Pond" in 1965; four years later, when he was interviewed by David Frost for the BBC, Wilson was pictured at 10 Downing Street with a Lowry on the wall behind him. In 1967, Lowry's "Coming Out of School" appeared on the highest denomination postage stamp in a series dedicated to "great British artists" (the others were Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Constable). In 1976, the year he died, Lowry was honored by a retrospective at the Royal Academy which attracted a record 180,000 visitors.

ow does one explain the Lowry phenomenon? Art critics obviously contributed to his success, although it is not enough to suggest that he was simply "discovered" by the critics in 1939. That is the story told by Maurice Collis in The Discovery of L. S. Lowry. As heroic as it is--the old story of unappreciated genius, of hidden talent found--it can neither account for Lowry's postwar popularity, outside the narrow realm of his critics, nor explain how his works have come to symbolize the North, in the process consolidating the remembrance of the nation's industrial past. Still, the critical response to Lowry remains important because some strands of it did generate a particular image of the man and his work that helped to fuel the nostalgia for the working-class past that has become so ubiquitous in Britain.

Given Lowry's elusiveness, critics were able to tell several different stories about him. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, they offered three versions of his work; indeed, one might suggest that they invented three distinct Lowrys. First, there was the "political Lowry," committed artist of the dispossessed and their struggle for a more equitable order. It proved difficult to maintain this reading of Lowry, especially since he painted no explicitly political scenes, with the possible exception of "A Procession" (1938), a painting which depicts a trade union procession in the background. Second, there was an "existential Lowry," lonely artist of the sad and solitary, adrift amidst the alien forces of modernity. This Lowry was concocted by Mervyn Levy, a critic who created an image of Lowry as a lonely man with "the power to express the terrible isolation of the individual soul, suspended irrevocably in the arctic loneliness that is the destiny of us all." As appealing as Levy's arguments were, Lowry's postwar popularity owed little to this formulation of the artist's presumed existential angst. Finally, there was the "English Lowry," the inheritor of a great tradition of native art. Each Lowry had his own agenda, but only the latter fostered his postwar popularity.

After the war, it was customary to think of Lowry as the artist who had discovered "beauty" amidst the grime of industrial Britain, who had made the North an object of aesthetic veneration. By no means "beautiful" when he started to paint it, the industrial North only came to acquire the attributes of beauty slowly. This makes it all the more striking that most of Lowry's early admirers praised him for depicting such an ugly world. One critic, writing in 1921, suggested that Lowry "emphasises violently everything that industrialism has done to make . . . Lancashire more forbidding than most other places." Likewise, Howard Spring, a leftist journalist, praised Lowry for depicting the bleakness of the industrial scene.

This particular assessment of Lowry's work was championed most of all by Francis Klingender, a prominent Marxist art critic. Klingender argued that Lowry was no "romantic artist" who looked "for picturesque views among the slums." He also claimed that although many Northerners abhorred Lowry's work, they would soon face up to their conditions in order to change them and in so doing would come to appreciate Lowry's genius. Klingender was right to assume that many workers disliked Lowry's paintings in the 1930s. Although we do not have much evidence, we do know that workers who handled Lowry's canvases did not care for them. As Fred Ball, an apprentice framer, claimed: "A lot of us were poor and life was a struggle. Having been brought up to think . . . in terms of beauty, I wanted something different in art--I saw the sort of things . . . Lowry was painting every day at home." Klingender also correctly suggested that many workers would change their minds about Lowry. But he was not right in assuming that they would do so only after they had developed a political awareness of the world in which they lived. In fact, it was not until that world had been drastically altered by postwar affluence and urban redevelopment that Lowry would come to be widely appreciated--and then shorn of the politics that critics such as Spring and Klingender read into his work.

By the 1950s, radical readings of Lowry's work were in abeyance. Even Spring, writing in 1957, no longer viewed Lowry as a political, but rather as a romantic, artist. Illustrating his newer insights with various paintings, Spring now pointed out that they exhibited "the romance that is there when you open up the door   .  .  . in an industrial town." In short, his critics no longer seemed interested in the "political Lowry," largely because of their growing infatuation with the "English Lowry." Rejecting continental modernism, one critic wrote that the "British vision of the native scene" had been "irrevocably weakened by [a] stream of continental influences, many of them too exotic and sensuous for home consumption." Lowry, contended another writer, created "beauty from the industrial scene" and owed "nothing to Continental influences." These sentiments were common in the 1940s, when the war made it imperative to define an "essential Englishness" on behalf of which citizens were asked to fight, and in the 1950s because of a native resistance to international modernism.

THE VOYEUR SURVEYS HIS DOMAIN. In this arresting photograph, Crispin Eurich captures L. S. Lowry in pursuit of the industrial landscape at the Stockport Viaduct. (Courtesy of the The First Gallery, Southhampton)

In both decades, critics drew comparisons between the work of Lowry and that of Constable, thereby establishing Lowry's importance in the canon of English art. As Eric Newton put it in 1945, "Lowry's Pendleton is as positive and convincing as Con-stable's East Bergholt." Through such statements a complex transformation was enacted, resulting in the creation of what the literary theorist, William Empson, writing in the 1930s, termed an "urban pastoral," aestheticizing the industrial North.

The interwar years had already witnessed a deification of the pastoral in Britain in the face of the rapid emergence of out-of-town housing estates, arterial highways, and ribbon development. Moreover, in the 1930s, the North was often represented through pastoral imagery by middle-class observers who depicted working-class communities there in romantic terms. It was this process that made Lowry's works--now shorn of their subversive potential--available for nostalgic appropriation. And it was in this context that Newton countered the "political Lowry" of Spring and Klingender with a new, romantic "English Lowry." One could, he argued, view industrial conditions with hatred and become a social reformer, or, to use his words, with "tender and . . . compassionate love" that goes "deeper than hatred." According to Newton, this is what Lowry did. He concluded: Lowry's "love of the scene gives his anthropomorphic blackbeetles a quality of fairyland and turns the sordidness into poetry." Newton praised Lowry's urban pastoral as the start of a renaissance in English art. In the process, however, the "political Lowry" vanished, and Lowryscapes became "fairylands" which the entire nation was now invited to celebrate.

By the mid-1950s, not only had Lowry's urban landscapes been depoliticized, but they had become crucial signifiers of the North. Lowry, wrote the director of Liverpool's Walker Gallery, projected "Lancashire onto the larger screen of national perception." Yet, it was a Lancashire that had been highly sanitized, a world in which, as Mervyn Levy put it, grime and squalor had become "something very clean and pure, even poetic."

This particular Lowry--the Lowry whose paintings had come to symbolize the North and had been cast in the mode of the urban pastoral--only reached maturity in the 1950s. It was then, when Lowry reproductions came to adorn the walls of so many homes, that their meaning was hard to extricate from an entire critical apparatus that had concocted the "English Lowry." Furthermore, it was then that his representations of the North became so ubiquitous that they were, as one critic noted, "indistinguishable from the reality" they depicted, now "accepted as the Authorised Version of life in the north." Once this occurred, it became possible for the North to find its voice by imitating Lowry's work. Thus, in a 1958 BBC documentary on Lowry, the director juxtaposed photographs of the industrial landscape with Lowry's paintings, the former reminding him of the latter. The two million viewers who saw the program were taught to interpret photographic evidence of "the real" through the aesthetics of Lowry as framed by the BBC and other critics who understood him through the prism of the urban pastoral.

It became increasingly commonplace to render the North as a Lowryscape. Two decades after the BBC screened its influential documentary, another film also assumed that Lowry had captured the truth of the North and offered his paintings as evidence of "the real" rather than as highly mediated representations of it. Around the same time, Manchester's touring theater group, the Shuttle Company, enacted Lowry's paintings on stage, animating his perception of everyday working-class life and thereby further authenticating Lowry's version of the North. The transformation was complete. First, Lowry painted the North; then the critics both romanticized his canvases and said that he had painted the North as it really was; finally, the North was presented on the national stage as a giant Lowry canvas.

he popular appeal of Lowry in the 1950s and after owed much to the "English Lowry" of the critics, to their aestheticized, fairyland version of the North. It was this construct of Lowry's importance, disseminated through the media, that framed popular readings of the millions of prints of his industrial scenes that rolled off the presses after the war. By 1961, as the Lancashire writer Shelagh Delaney noted, copies of Lowry's works were hung in schools throughout Salford. Every child in the city grew up, she wrote, "as I grew up, with this artist's vision of their own particular world before them."

The circulation of Lowryscapes that made her experience possible owes much to advances in color print technology. The Medici Society marketed Lowry prints early on, while Boots, the chemists, sold thousands of them in the 1960s (one to Carolyn Steedman's mother). In recent years, galleries in possession of Lowry originals have capitalized on the market for them. The shop and lobby of the Salford Gallery is littered with copies of inexpensive Lowrys, mostly printed by the Medici Society or Mainstone Publications. The most popular Lowry print with visitors to the Salford Gallery is "Coming from the Mill," often bought because it reminds its purchasers of the locale in which they once lived or because it is intended as a gift for friends or relatives who have moved away.

One retired Bolton millworker claimed in the 1970s that Lowry was popular because he "saw what many of the old generation saw and experienced." We might add that he saw what many of these people were increasingly unable to see once the world he painted began to be torn apart. And this brings us to the need to relate Lowry's popularity to the context in which his prints were received --that of the reconstruction of Britain's built environment.

The need to replace houses bombed in the war, and to reinstate policies of slum clearance halted by the war, occupied British governments after 1945. Some 1.3 million houses were razed between 1955 and 1975, an era of redevelopment that displaced three million people. The old industrial landscape was transformed. Some regions were more prone to the wrecker's ball than others, and in Salford whole districts were bulldozed. By the end of the 1970s, 44.3 percent of all homes in the city had been built since the war. As one observer noted, there were few places "which have been so comprehensively altered in such a short time."

Critics of postwar redevelopment have been keen to note that it was not only buildings that were destroyed in the process of reconstruction, but the very fabric of the traditional working-class community. It is abundantly clear that urban renewal gave rise to a wholly new landscape that disrupted traditional patterns of social life. This was particularly true in Salford, where, in 1980, the city guide claimed exuberantly that another 15,000 houses had been cleared in the 1970s and that the smoky world recorded by Lowry "is now a memory." Yet it was a memory that was both cherished and actively cultivated; it was also a memory that Lowry's works played a crucial role in sustaining. As one critic suggested, just as Proust and his madeleines helped in remembering childhoods lost, so Lowry and his industrial landscapes contributed to the process of remembering working-class pasts lost.

Nostalgia for the world of mills and cobbled streets, and for the communities that were formed there, has been a ubiquitous feature of postwar British society. Moreover, the spirit that once activated that world has been a highly sought-after commodity. But as the sociologist Norman Dennis, writing in 1957, pointed out, it was impossible to maintain that spirit on the new housing estates. Community spirit emerged from the sharing of common experiences that gave rise to collective memory, but in the new world, where the generations were dispersed and where people no longer shared a history, community spirit could no longer thrive.

Dennis noted what few others did in the 1950s, namely that, in destroying the old neighborhoods, redevelopment also erased the basis for those forms of collective memory that were necessary for community spirit to flourish. Postwar housing plans demanded the bulldozing of vast urban areas, the likes of which Lowry had painted, resulting in the experience of cultural dislocation. Many found themselves severed from earlier structures of community life that had generated stable forms of collective memory. Their experience of modernity entailed a breakage of ties to the past, a visceral wiping out of whatever came before, and, consequently, the encouragement of forgetting. But in Britain in the 1950s, the pressure to forget was paralleled by a desire to remember, and it is no accident that urban renewal was accompanied by an interest in collecting those objects that could serve, in part, both to resurrect a lost past and reconnect people to it. Just as the arrival of artistic modernism in Britain generated an attempt to recuperate a heritage of "English" art (to which Lowry was attached), so the modernization of the built environment generated a similar interest in preserving and celebrating the remnants of a vanishing landscape. Lowry's urban pastoral became popular after the war because, in an age dominated both by a breakage with the past and a need to deny that breakage, it nurtured the desire for the past. Reproductions of his industrial landscapes became landscapes of memory, serving an important mnemonic function amidst the cultural dislocations of the postwar world.

These points emerge clearly in Shirley Baker's book, Street Photographs. Between 1960 and 1973, Baker charted the demise of the traditional working-class community in and around Man-chester, explaining that she wanted to "capture some trace of the everyday life" of the people who lived there "before the great upheaval." Despite the destruction of a whole way of life, Baker contended that memories still lingered, and she set herself the task of giving substance to those memories, and of helping to trigger them, through her images.

Street Photographs opens with a record of life in the old communities; it then moves to document the demolition of those communities; and it concludes with images of the new tower blocks that were replacing the old terraced houses. The new blocks, however, are depicted in the distance. While, in the first part of the book, Baker places herself in the very heart of the community she is documenting, here she positions herself at a remove, portraying the new as an alien and ominous presence menacing on the horizon. It is a presence, however, that never completely eradicates the reminders of a vanishing world. Cobbled streets, some leading nowhere, still remain, shorn of the terraced houses that once adorned them and gave them life. The old landscape has not vanished entirely, and it is through the traces that remain that reconnection to the past can be sought. In the midst of the site of urban renewal, people appear as if they might be searching for a resurrection of other traces that would once again make the vanished world come alive, that would make it whole. Since the 1950s, the appetite for those traces has been voracious, contributing to projects such as Baker's. It has also contributed to Lowry's popularity because his paintings populate those desolate streets afresh, connecting individuals to a world now difficult to find.

f modernity entails a rupture in historical consciousness, then one of its byproducts is nostalgia for older, more settled, ways of life--and for places in which those lives were lived. As the phenomenologist Edward Casey has noted, it "is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences that contributes so powerfully to its . . . memorability." When places are transformed, however, traces of them often remain, and these, too, can arouse memory; or, to borrow again from Casey, "things congeal the places we remember, just as places congeal remembered worlds." Lowry's prints function in the manner he suggests. They are objects that authenticate the past and stimulate memory of it, shards of lost experience and artifacts evocative of that experience.

It is pertinent that Lowry viewed the scenes he depicted from a distance. As a rent collector, a voyeur of working-class life who rarely focused upon domestic or factory interiors, the life of the street was all he had available to him. But in his paintings the life of the street was portrayed from above, or cut off by a horizontal line that accentuated its separateness from the observer. In this sense, his works engaged in a key representational practice that is central to the urban pastoral, that of rendering the industrial landscape as "beauty" by visualizing it from afar.

The crucial point is that just as Lowry was a voyeur of the traditional working-class community between the wars, many people who had once lived in those communities had become voyeurs of them after the war. Often living on the new housing estates, they had been detached from the older world Lowry painted. Even if they desired to be part of that world again--to be on the inside, as was Shirley Baker in her studies of the old communities--this was now difficult. But there were images available to them of their own past way of life that could help engender memories of it. This was a major function of Lowry's prints, because, as one critic noted, echoing Casey, "nothing conjures up nostalgia like a sense of place, and Lowry certainly had that."

Many oral history projects emerged in Britain once urban renewal had significantly altered the older spatial environment that Lowry painted. Severed from traditional working-class communities, people were encouraged to remember their past and to reconstruct their everyday lives through the practice of writing. In Salford in the 1970s, several projects were initiated, resulting in the publication of a number of autobiographical testimonies to the lost world with which Lowry was increasingly associated. By exploring the structure of these narratives, and by examining the similarities between them and those in Lowry's paintings, we can develop further ways of accounting for his appeal.

The first point to be noted about these works is the ways in which their temporal structure differs significantly from that of the classic autobiography penned by Victorian artisans. The nineteenth-century autodidact narrative recounted a story of the progress of the self, in which past and present were linked, the past constituting the soil in which the present was nurtured. By contrast, the Salford autobiographies sever past and present; they constitute a "before" and an "after" and focus primarily on the former. In short, they posit a breakage with the past, a world that is viewed as wholly discontinuous with the present, a world they attempt to recuperate through writing. Instead of celebrating the moment of arrival in the present, as did Victorian autodidacts, Salford writers lament the loss of the past. As such, these recollections are all exercises in nostalgia: "There are now no small communities with local churches but soul-less high rise flats and plastic shopping centres"; "We should've never pulled them houses down"; "I will always look upon those times with a great feeling of nostalgia." These are some of the laments.

Second, these Salford studies are also exercises in thick description of a vanished world. Their focus is on the mundane and the ordinary--family and kinship ties, local entertainments, daily shopping, and, most of all, the life of the street. Archaeologies of the particular, excavations of the density of everyday life, these works also focus on the problem of memory, on its fragility, and on the need to codify its products. "Now that the bulldozers destroy the rows of terraced houses," asserts one writer, "I feel this story must be told, otherwise memory will go into oblivion." All of these writers experience the difficulty of memory and yet persist in their reconstruction work, making use of the traces and vaguely-remembered incidents that remain.

Like Lowry, these autobiographers in Salford were outsiders, cut off from those scenes they could only represent from a distance. Their works are imbued by an essential changelessness, because, like Lowry, they were happiest between the wars, and that is the world they desire to reconstitute. As many critics have noted, Lowry tried to deep-freeze the world of his youth. The clothes, factories, and street furniture in his paintings always remained in the style of the interwar years, resulting in paintings that were exercises in social cryogenics. So, too, are these autobiographies, for they are works that freeze the world between the wars and, in so doing, create our own topographies of the traditional working-class community. Finally, and also like Lowry's paintings, these narratives are composites, made up of interchangeable parts. Lowry seldom painted any specific scene, but rather constructed each work out of his miscellaneous sketches in order to create what became a generic industrial landscape. This resulted in a repetition of a familiar stock of images, just as in the Salford reminiscences there is repetition--rearrangements of a common stock of stories about the past.

In short, like Lowry's canvases, these memoirs consolidate a particular series of images of the old, traditional working-class community, and they do so in ways paralleled in Lowry's canvases. Moreover, we know that at least in one instance these two modes of remembering the North, the autobiographical and the visual, overlapped in significant ways. In 1957 Lowry undertook a new work, "Old Road, Failsworth." He did so not from his own memory, nor from actually having recorded the place as it once was. Instead, Ruth Johnson, who wrote an autobiographical reminiscence of life in Failsworth, told her story to Lowry, who subsequently represented the world she described in a painting that became the frontispiece to her book. Johnson's editor wrote that, despite fifty years of change, memories of Failsworth's past remained "untarnished and intact." But Johnson's memories were articulated at a specific historical juncture in which a number of other memories, traces, and images--including those painted by Lowry--informed her own story. That story shaped one of Lowry's paintings, which, in turn, served as yet one more memory trace in the repertoire of images that consolidated the working-class past.

fter the war, Lowry came to share with his admirers a sense of loss, a longing for the world as it had been. He always admitted he was happiest in the 1920s and claimed he got a "bit wistful" for the "old Salford." He found it hard to return to scenes he had once painted, only to find them in a state of flux. Like many who purchased his prints, he came to believe that once upon a time life had been much richer. Artist and audience were severed from a world that had been lost and yet was still highly desired; they discovered a mutual affinity in their dislocation, the images of the former serving to give form to the nostalgia of the latter. If, as has been noted, Lowry offered "an Elysian fabrication of the north as he wanted it to be," he became popular when others began to share a desire for that fabrication. As Peter Fuller has noted, Lowry posited a return to Eden and discovered a land "flowing with milk and honey not in some estranged vision of utopia, but in the smoky heart of the city itself." It was a land to which many others wished to return.

If Lowry came to symbolize both the North and the "genius of English painting," he is soon to be rewarded for his efforts by the construction of a Lowry Center in Salford. He will be reconstituted again, this time by the burgeoning heritage industry. But that is another story. It is, perhaps, also an unlikely story, given the recent attempts to challenge his continuing influence. To be sure, long before he was popular with the public, he was actively championed by the critics. But when his images were widely circulated, when he became admired by the lumpen populace, and when, God forbid, the Queen actually bought one of his paintings, many members of the art world turned their backs on him. In a late 1980s Royal Academy survey of British art in the twentieth century, Lowry's name was conspicuous by its absence. The initial "discovery" of Lowry owed much to the effects of the Depression and the war, which turned the nation's attention to the North and to the lives of its inhabitants. Lowry's popularity, by contrast, was related in complex ways to dislocations experienced in the early postwar years. But these two historical moments have both passed, and with them, perhaps, so has Lowry's representational significance in the post-postwar world. Even the cities of the North, in their attempt to attract new business to the region, are weary of being rendered a Lowryscape: "It's time someone painted a new picture of the North West," claims one advertisement, attempting to remap that part of the nation that Lowry once put on the map in a very particular way.

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