Milton Keynes has been shortlisted for UK City of Culture 2029. The announcement has come on the day MK Gallery opens L.S. Lowry: The Theatre of Life, the first major exhibition devoted to Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887 to 1976) in more than thirteen years. It runs from 24 October 2026 to 28 February 2027, and it closes a year of events marking fifty years since the artist’s death.
More than 140 paintings and drawings are on show. Sixty-eight come from the Lowry in Manchester, which holds the world’s best-known collection of his work, with further loans from Tate, the Royal Academy of Arts and private owners. Two stand out. A Football Match (1932) is on view in a public gallery for the first time in almost eighty-five years. Lancashire Fair: Good Friday, Daisy Nook (1946) comes from the Government Art Collection and once hung in 10 Downing Street.
Anthony Spira, the gallery’s director and a co-curator, called it a thrilling day, and thanked the Lowry for sharing so generously, describing the show as a true North-South collaboration. Milton Keynes turns sixty next year, and he sees the exhibition as a fitting way to raise the curtain.
Lowry is among the most loved of British artists, and yet his exhibitions are rare. This one tries to look past the famous mill scenes. There are pencil and charcoal studies from the antique and from life, detailed urban drawings, and works in pastel and watercolour, which show a wider practice than most visitors will expect. The work stays relatable, the gallery argues, because it is unpretentious and because it watches ordinary life and gesture with humour, absurdity and real feeling.
The biography is familiar but worth repeating. Born in Stretford, Lowry collected rents around Salford and its districts, a job he held for more than forty years, and turned the industrial landscape of the north west into some of the defining images of postwar Britain. He studied as an evening student at Salford School of Art from 1915 under Bernard D. Taylor, the former Manchester Guardian art critic. His shadowless, dark-outlined figures were made with just five undiluted oil colours: ivory black, vermilion, Prussian blue, yellow ochre and flake white. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1955, and he turned down a CBE, a knighthood, and a Companion of Honour, the last of which was offered twice.
A good deal of myth has gathered around him, including the idea that he was elusive and cut off from modernism. Re-examining that is a key theme here. The show places his life and career within the wider changes of twentieth-century Britain, as the mills, terraced streets and working communities he painted were bombed, cleared and replaced.
A 200-page illustrated monograph accompanies the exhibition, funded by the Jerwood Foundation. It carries new research by Ella Nixon, Claire Stewart and Chris Waters, as well as contributions from the artists Maggi Hambling, Merlin James, George Shaw and Linder Sterling. Elsewhere in the anniversary year there has been the BBC documentary L.S. Lowry: The Unheard Tapes, with Ian McKellen, on iPlayer, and exhibitions in Berwick and Cheshire.
L.S. Lowry: The Theatre of Life is at MK Gallery, 900 Midsummer Boulevard, Milton Keynes MK9 3QA, Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm, closed Mondays.