From Plymouth to Edinburgh: a walker?s guide to six British cities

There seem to me two interesting ways of tracing the steps of Lowry. One is to seek out those places where he dashed off rough sketches, places like Peel Park in Salford, Ancoats, or the streets around Pendlebury and Victoria Park close to where Lowry lived; or perhaps Crowther Street in Stockport, where he tightened the angles to get just the effect he was after. But so many of the mills, factories and houses have been razed, and it is a feat sometimes to conjure a picture of the places featured in the masterworks.

Over the course of its five sections, the poem mentions Greenwich, the Isle of Dogs, River Thames, the Cannon Street hotel (the venue for the foundation congress of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920, bombed during the Blitz) and Metropole hotel (now the Corinthia), the Strand, Queen Victoria Street and, for those who need a suburb to make a walk feel complete, Richmond and Kew.