Trams in Albert Square by Arthur Delaney
Trams in Albert Square captures the feel of daily life in post-war northern England. We see double-decker street cars going through Albert Square in Manchester, with the tram in the foreground stopping to pick up passengers. The people are small and not very detailed, with their clothing being the only distinguishing feature of each figure. Delaney’s painting looks northwest across the square, with the Albert Memorial’s neo-Gothic spires extending upwards towards the muddy grey sky, either made dark by nighttime or, more likely, stained with pollution.
The painting’s setting, the city of Manchester, was the world’s first industrialized city, serving as the center of British textile manufacturing. British cities with heavy industry were nearly always blanketed with smog produced by the chimneys of factories and the coal-burning fireplaces most British people used to heat their homes. Although manufacturing has declined and air quality has improved in Britain, the image of the industrialized city remains a stereotype in the popular imagination.
For most of his professional life, Arthur Delaney worked in the Manchester textile factories’ design studios. His earliest paintings date back to the 1950s, but he would not pursue painting professionally until 1972. Despite living through a time when manufacturing was leaving the country, his paintings continued to capture the essence of living in an industrialized society. His street scenes are populated with scores of working people in flat caps and respectable dresses, all of them faceless and anonymous like Laurence Stephen Lowry’s “matchstick men”. The trams carry people across the city, all against a grey sky perpetually darkened by the fumes of far-off smokestacks. In fact, paintings like Trams in Albert Square are some of his most interesting works. The trams themselves are a symbol of urbanization and technological progress. They pass by the Albert Memorial, a monument commemorating the late consort of Queen Victoria, under whose rule Britain rose to become one of the world’s leading industrial powers. Yet the memorial still stands nearly a century later, watching as the industry that built Manchester starts to leave. Delaney’s Trams in Albert Square is a time capsule, showing the artist’s hometown in the final years before the uncertainty of deindustrialization. Yet it also transports the viewer to mid-century Britain in all its smoggy glory.