L.S. Lowry at Tate Britain – Grim Viewing

As a Scot who was brought up on Tyneside in the Seventies and Eighties, I feel more qualified than most to commentate on matters pertaining to the Grim North. Critics might object that I’m middle-class, and that twenty years of living in the South have made me soft. I did manual labouring jobs as a teenager, and as a student worked at Pizza Hut in the Bigg Market – probably the toughest drinking hole in the Britain. And if I wanted to be a geographic snob about it, I could challenge Lowry’s N...