Skeleton Quays

On they trudge, heads bowed low by hard lives – Lowry’s people, regiments of them, trooping glumly across the walls of The Lowry, the Salford arts complex that has just celebrated its tenth anniversary.

Their glumness has been reflected by some of the 2,500 BBC employees due to be relocated this year to the grandly named MediaCityUK, being built next to the Lowry at Salford Quays, Manchester’s old docks area on the banks of the Ship Canal.

The BBC has reportedly spent more than £685,000 on mini-breaks to show some of its more reluctant staff what they’ll find when several departments, including the Breakfast show, decamp from London to its new northern base – trailed as a “creative hub” full of “iconic brands” in “state-of-the-art buildings”.

But what state is Salford’s art in now? What is there at this self-styled “unique waterfront destination” to lure visitors? My fact-finding day-out takes in four fascinating cultural centres – two of them high-profile, the others less so – with a working-class theme running through all.

If he were painting Salford and its people today, Lowry’s canvases would look very different. No factory chimneys, no cranes, no ships, not much sign of the old industries, but plenty of the new industries... culture, shopping, tourism, media. Perhaps the only place he’d feel at home would be the set of Coronation Street, due to be moved here, together with a new production centre, next year.

The Manchester Metrolink is the key to the Quays. Down the escalator at Piccadilly station, the tram weaves a dream-like way across the city centre. As it glides across bridges and along high-level ramps, it offers a better view of Manchester’s handsome Victorian buildings and startling modern ones than the pavement hurry generally allows.

Past a stop called Pomona, suggesting orchards but delivering a multi-storey car park, I get off at Harbour City, which sounds more bustling than it is. The Lowry looms beyond car parks, trim lawns and the great still lakes that used to be dock basins.

“You are in a designated public place,” says a notice on a lamppost, but there’s not much sign of the designated public.

Salford Quays is regeneration at its most radical, a sort of architectural sculpture park with acres of apartments. Mid-morning, it has an air of suspended animation; mid-evening, it can be eerily quiet. The planners and architects forgot to sprinkle the stardust of soul over it. Only the names surviving from the old days – Huron Basin, Erie Basin, Ontario Basin – resonate with history and romance. But no matter. The Lowry and the Imperial War Museum North are the reasons to come.

The Lowry looks as off-the-wall now as it did when it opened, something between geometry and cookery with its vegetable-grater tower and its hunks of metal like enormous orange-segments. Inside, it’s bright purple, angular and vast – and, against the odds, very welcoming.

Its theatre regularly hosts Opera North and it has the world’s biggest collection of Lowry paintings and drawings (400 of them). Industrial scenes are offset by seascapes (urban crowds trudging across beaches) and the odd Cotswold view, with Lowry’s sickly white Lancashire skies transposed to Oxfordshire.

Clips from TV documentaries about him offer plenty of insights.

“Had I not been lonely, none of my work would have happened,” he says in one of them. “I should not have done what I’ve done or seen the way I saw things.”

Downstairs is a helpful tourist information centre and a shop selling Lowry jigsaws, fridge magnets, cufflinks, mouse mats and ginger crunch biscuits. No Lowry clogs, mufflers or cough medicine – but, hey, there’s a few ideas for the merchandising guys!

Outside, life imitates art. A grey sky lours over the Quays as I cross to the Imperial War Museum North, that great overground bunker whose shattered steel shards symbolise the destructiveness of war.

Its almost-hidden entrance, across pavements of fragmented slate, reflects war’s confusion, and the theme is continued inside, with the displays ricocheting you from The Somme to Basra to Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.

It’s naturally a sober museum, a moving meditation on war not a celebration. The great set-pieces – a suspended Harrier jet, a tank – are offset by small personal details.

From the First World War, there’s a scrawled eye-witness letter describing the naval attack on Whitby in 1914: “The sound was truly terrifying. We saw streams of people with panic-stricken faces trying to get away.”

And there’s film of a soldier stumbling through the trenches, his right hand shaking uncontrollably.

I’d planned to stroll the mile-and-a-half across from the Quays into Salford itself. On the way, I’d have taken in a real-life Coronation Street and two musical locations: the Salford Lads’ Club, pictured on an Eighties’ Smiths album, and Cross Lane, scene of the fair that inspired the logically-named Cross Lane Fair by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies – as yet the only Master of the Queen’s Music born in Salford.

That was the idea, but the grey sky has given way to grey rain and (as there’s no bus link) I take a taxi to Salford Museum and Art Gallery.

The bulk of The Lowry’s Lowrys used to be kept here – wall after wall of them – but they’ve all gone, leaving just a rack of frame-yourself prints.

It’s a pity, really, as they’d have a natural context in this handsome Victorian gallery with its creaky floors and friendly attendants.

Across the road is the Working Class Movement Library, whose compact permanent exhibition (open Wednesday, Thursday and Friday afternoons) complements Manchester’s newly-reopened People’s History Museum: the world of Peterloo, the Chartists, Ban the Bomb, the Mass Trespasses, CND, the Spanish Civil War.

The library, running to 30,000 books, 100,000 pamphlets and some of the earliest trade union records, was based on the collection of one couple, Ruth and Eddie Frow. As it overflowed their three-bedroomed semi, Ruth reflected: “One of us calls it a hobby. The other is under no illusion. It’s a disease.”

The collection includes reports and minute books from the Amalgamated Society of Boilermakers, Blacksmiths, Shipbuilders and Structural Workers. A long way from those creative hubs and iconic brands.

getting there...

• Salford tourist information: 0161 848 8601 (www.visitsalford.info).

• The Lowry: 0843 208 6000 (www.thelowry.com). Imperial War Museum North: 0161 836 4000 (www.iwm.org.uk/north). Salford Museum & Art Gallery: 0161 778 0800 (www.salford.gov.uk). Working Class Movement Library: 0161 736 3601 (www.wcml.org.uk). All open free.