Next tours:
* Lowry’s Manchester: Sunday 8 January 2017, 1.30pm from the Visitor Centre.
* Lowry’s Salford: No new dates yet. Meet Victoria Station wallmap.

Spurned, snubbed and sniggered at, Laurence Stephen Lowry became Britain’s most famous and best-loved 20th century painter, whose works now sell for millions.

He called himself a “simple man”, but he was the strangest of fellows. He never left the British Isles, enjoyed no sexual relations, and made his will over to a much younger woman, whom he befriended simply because she shared his surname.

Lowry’s day job was not as an artist but a rent collector in the slum areas of the city, and as we explore the man behind the paintings we take you through the haunts he visited and depicted.