Going to the Match, painted in 1953, is L.S. Lowry's best-known and most popular picture. Although he painted football-themed scenes before and after this date it is Going to the Match which has become iconic - an enduring representation of what match day means to fans. The painting features Burnden Park, the original home of Bolton Wanderers. It is typical of Lowry that his focus is not on the match itself, but on the crowds streaming towards the ground. He spent much of his life painting people going about their everyday lives - going to work, to school, to the park and here, going to the match. Lowry's painting represents the world of football in the 1950s but its timeless quality makes it as relevant today as it ever was.

James Hamilton Hay was a Birkenhead-born painter and printmaker, who lived and worked in Liverpool for many years. This work contrasts Lowry’s realism, offering a decorative, romanticised style instead. A crowd of window shoppers look in at an opulent shopfront display.

Although appearing to be a 'typical' Lowry painting, Going to Work is an example of Lowry's experimentation with watercolour in late 1950s, a medium in which he only completed a few paintings. "Watercolours I've used only occasionally. They don't really suit me...dry too quickly. They're not flexible enough. I like a medium you can walk into, over a period of time."

This scene of a woman ironing a football kit captures the reality of grassroots sport. It shows the care, pride and labour that goes into football matches. This work showed in the Arts Council’s competition ‘Football and the Fine Arts’, which toured to Birkenhead. Entrants were encouraged to paint ‘any aspect of Association football’, and many of the selected works reflected the human element of the game.

This drawing appears to show a newspaper seller with a crowd around him. Lowry was always drawn to impromptu gatherings in the streets, such as this.

Geoff Yeomans’s quintessentially Northern scene of a rainy day at the beach depicting a crowd of people huddled under a shelter to get out of the rain. Yeomans’s work is often in very much domestic and gritty, focusing on the everyday activities in people’s lives.

Later in his career, Lowry began painting and drawing small groups of figures or individuals against a plain white background. There is little architectural or scenic in this painting to suggest location. Lowry insisted that the characters in these works were all based on real people he observed on the streets.

Like Lowry, although he was a trained painter, Christopher Wood favoured a deliberately naive, almost childlike approach to painting figures. The work shows an intimate family scene in a café. The composition is dynamic, offering a snapshot of daily family life.

Nicola Rowley captures her dad, Antonio ‘Tony’ Rowley (1929-2006), in an unguarded moment. Rowley was a centre forward for Liverpool (1953-1958) and Tranmere Rovers (1958-1961). He was capped for Wales, and scored the last ever Christmas Day goal for Liverpool in 1957.