Going to the Match

It is indeed commonly supposed that the football ground shown in Lowry's Going to the Match is Burnden Park, but there appears to be no concrete evidence to support this suggestion. In fact this article on the Bolton News website lists several reasons why it cannot be.

Lowry was born in Stretford, and grew up in Victoria Park (a leafy part of Rusholme). In 1909 the family moved to Pendlebury, Salford, and in 1948 (nine years after the death of his mother) the house was repossessed as Lowry had failed to maintain it properly. He bought a house in Mottram – near Glossop, on the outskirts of the Peak District– and lived there until his death in 1976. He said that Pendlebury and its environs had been a great source of inspiration to him, but there appears to be no record of him linking Going to the Match directly to Burnden Park.

www.lowry.co.uk (an online art dealer) describes the work as "One of several football subjects painted by Lowry, who was always keenly interested in sport: football and cricket in particular."It continues: "Many of these pictures have either direct or imaginary links with Burnden Park, Bolton, home of Bolton Wanderers football club,a ground only a few miles from Pendlebury and often visited by Lowry, as a young man. However, as with so many of his Industrial Landscapes, his football pictures are usually a 'composite' of the actual and the imaginary, incorporating a variety of elements from the stock mythos of Lowry's imagery. Factories, buildings and streets, woven into a 'vision'. As Lowry said to the writer, 'If I had shown things as they are – it would not have looked like a vision. So I had to make up symbols. With my figures also, of course.' The picture therefore is not a picture of a particular football match [or even, we may infer, a particular ground] but a vision of all football matches."

So Lowry was familiar with Burnden Park, but he was known to be a keen supporter of Manchester City and he was no doubt aware of the five or more other Football League grounds in and around what is now Greater Manchester. (Let's not forget the likes of Glossop North End and Stalybridge Celtic!) We should probably conclude that the ground in Going to the Match is an amalgam of all of them.