Lowry’s Manchester station scene offered for more than £3 million
MacConnal-Mason will bring Station Approach, Manchester to the LAPADA Berkeley Square Fair, offering a substantial cityscape closely related to the artist’s Royal Academy diploma painting.
L.S. Lowry’s Station Approach, Manchester (1960), a large canvas depicting crowds around the city’s now-demolished Exchange Station, will be offered for more than £3 million at the LAPADA Berkeley Square Fair in London. St James’s dealer MacConnal-Mason is presenting the painting at the fair, which runs from 27 October to 1 November.
Measuring 76.2 × 101.6 cm, the painting belongs to Lowry’s mature period, when his familiar urban subjects could assume considerable scale and compositional ambition. It was exhibited at Alex. Reid & Lefevre in October 1961 under the title 'A Station Approach', placing it within the artist’s established exhibition history soon after its completion.
The subject is unusually specific. While Lowry frequently assembled imagined towns from buildings and streets encountered in different places, here he followed an identifiable Manchester view relatively closely. Exchange Station’s Victorian frontage anchors the composition, with crowds moving along Victoria Street, past the statue of Oliver Cromwell and towards the railway. Sotheby’s earlier catalogue identified some deliberate adjustments, including buildings and a viaduct on the left, probably drawn from nearby Greengate.
Opened in 1884, Exchange Station connected Manchester with destinations across northern England and beyond. It suffered serious damage during the Manchester Blitz in December 1940, with portions of its roof never replaced. Passenger services ended on 5 May 1969, nine years after Lowry painted this view, and were transferred to Manchester Victoria. The picture consequently preserves a major piece of the city’s transport architecture shortly before its disappearance from everyday use.
Lowry returned to the composition in 1962, the year he became a Royal Academician, presenting a smaller version as his diploma work. That painting, now in the Royal Academy’s collection, is an oil on board measuring 40.7 × 50.9 cm. The relationship gives the larger canvas particular interest: this was a subject Lowry chose to revisit at a significant moment of institutional recognition.
The current offering also has a documented auction history. Sotheby’s catalogued the 1960 canvas in 2014 with an estimate of £2 million to £3 million. Its provenance recorded earlier appearances at Christie’s in 1974 and 1984, followed by acquisition through Crane Kalman Gallery in the late 1980s. The forthcoming fair presentation is a dealer sale, with an asking price exceeding £3 million.
Its reappearance coincides with renewed institutional attention to Lowry in the fiftieth anniversary year of his death. L.S. Lowry: The Theatre of Life opens at MK Gallery on 24 October and continues until 28 February 2027. Together, the exhibition and the availability of this substantial Manchester scene offer an opportunity to look beyond the shorthand of “matchstick men” and reconsider the ambition of his urban painting.
