Lowry in the NE: Travel Article of the Year

Sunderland in May. The sun was trying, and failing, to get out and the ruffled grey sea was what people sometimes describe as pewter. In the bar of the Marriott Hotel I sat where Laurence Stephen Lowry used to sit half a century ago, gazing through the window and dreaming up his seascapes. 

Britain's most popular 20th century painter is synonymous with the industrial North West of England, where he grew up and lived all his life. But his life and work had a rich hinterland far beyond the matchstick men and cotton mills of Lancashire. 

Nowhere was it richer than in the coastal counties of Durham and Northumberland, which Lowry visited often from the mid-1930s until his death in 1976 at the age of 88. And the thing, above all, that drew him across the Pennines was the North Sea. 'It's all there. It's all in the sea. The Battle of Life is there. And Fate. And the inevitability of it all. And the purpose,' he said. 

He painted and sketched the North Sea in many forms, with and without boats, as backdrops to portraits - even in self-portraits. And the Seaburn Hotel (now the Marriott), on Sunderland's seafront, made the perfect base. From 1960, Room 104 became a home-from-home for the observer in the trilby and the three-piece suit. 

There is scarcely a trace of him in the modern, corporatised hotel but he lives on in folk memory - his habit of sketching on napkins, his liking for cold roast beef. 'My former supervisor used to serve him,' remembered Alison Agnew, who has worked at the hotel for 30 years. 'She said he was a lovely gentleman.' 

Shauna Gregg's uncle was a wine waiter at the hotel in Lowry's day. Now, as Keeper of Art at Sunderland Museum, Gregg curates the largest public collection of Lowry's paintings and drawings outside The Lowry Collection in Salford. It includes scenes of industry along the Wear, of slum clearance, strange buildings and stranger people - and, of course, the sea. 'There's a beauty and calm in them,' said Gregg of the seascapes. 'And also a loneliness.' 

Nothing is lonelier than a beached and wrecked boat, which Lowry drew six miles up the coast at South Shields in the early 1960s. He spent a lot of time at this spot, where the Tyne joins the sea by the notorious Black Midden rocks and, high on the headland, Tynemouth Priory and Castle provide a dramatically gothic backdrop. 

Standing in the car park of the Little Haven Hotel I gazed past the groyne pier and its red lighthouse to a big tanker heading for the river mouth. The scene was reminiscent of several of his works ('Beached Boat', 'Ship Entering the Tyne', 'Waiting for the Tide, South Shields' and more). 'I'm particularly fond of watching large ships coming into harbour, or being brought down a river by tugs,' Lowry said. 'I love the Tyne.' 

Not all his work in Sunderland Museum relates to the immediate area. Two drawings, of Berwick-on-Tweed and Bamburgh Castle, provide clues to the geography of his wider association with the North East. For Sunderland, in a sense, is the end of the story. It wasn't until the last few years of his life that he discovered the city ('I sometimes escape to Sunderland. I get away from art and artists,' he remarked) but his link with the region began much earlier. 

On my tour of the sites that he visited and captured in his work, I followed Lowry's North East history in reverse, from Sunderland north to the place where it started. This ruggedly beautiful coastline, from the Wear to the Tweed, was to Lowry what the South Seas were to Gauguin - an escape and an inspiration. 

In the mid-1930s escape was very much on his mind. After his father died in 1932 Lowry took on the responsibility of looking after his bedridden mother and the strain wore him down. When his doctor recommended a recuperative holiday. Lowry chose Berwick, and this town on the edge - of the sea, of England, of Scotland - got into his blood. 

Over the years he painted and sketched its medieval alleyways and Georgian terraces many times. He even thought of buying a house there - a derelict old place up on the town walls with lions on the gateposts, known as The Lions. 'I'm attracted to decay ... a derelict house gets me,' he once said, and though he didn't go through with his purchase of The Lions, its ghost appears in many of his paintings. 

The Lions - now immaculately restored and with a vividly floral front garden - features in The Lowry Trail, a free leaflet available in Berwick's tourist information centre with which you can guide yourself around the locations of 18 of Lowry's works. At each there is an information panel with a print of the work in question. 

The most intriguing is 'Dewars Lane' [corr., no apostrophe], a pencil drawing of an ancient cobbled alleyway, with a heavily leaning granary on one side, that hangs in Sunderland Museum. Lowry did it in 1936, conceivably on his first visit to Berwick, and - according to Juliet Horsley in her excellent book, L.S. Lowry in the North East - the sketch 'shows tension in every line'. What you see today is pretty much what Lowry saw, and what you feel - in that dark stone canyon - is a creeping oppression. 

It was a day of sunshine, showers and buffeting winds when I walked round Berwick - uncharacteristic of the flat light you find in his paintings. But down the coast at Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, the day before, I had had to check my limbs to make sure they hadn't turned into Swan Vestas, so perfectly Lowryian was the scene I found myself in. 

He loved St Bartholomew's Church, poised above the sea on its point of land, and did numerous paintings and drawings at Newbiggin. And though the new Maritime Centre is now slap bang in the middle of the scene he painted in 1966, the atmosphere was the same. 

On an otherwise monochrome day there were just a few splashes of colour, provided by the yellow awnings on the traditional coble fishing boats being hauled up the beach by tractors. And on the promenade above the beach I overheard a conversation that was very English, very melancholy - very Lowry, somehow. 

Daughter to elderly mother: 'You just drift apart.' 

Mother in reply: 'Ooo, I know.' 

Published in The Daily Telegraph on June 25, 2013