Spurned, snubbed and sniggered at, Laurence Stephen Lowry became Britain’s best-loved 20th century painter.

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, he was a rent collector in the slum areas of the city, and so we explore the man behind the paintings, and take you through the haunts he visited and depicted.