I never expected a single piece of art to articulate a worldview so precisely, but this one did. I must have spent ten minutes just staring at it, and another ten zooming in on the details, taking in every chimney, every rooftop. I had only recently made the move into renewables after a decade as a through-and-through ’leccy-board lad. I sat there with a Yorkshire brew with my old 1987 Manweb “Safety Wise” mug and thought, quietly but with absolute certainty: This is it. This is actually what we’re building. This is what our world could look like within the next decade.
The image was a reimagined version of Industrial Landscape, Ashton-under-Lyne (1952) by LS Lowry – a version now titled After Lowry. It sits in my office today, framed in gold, slightly too proud for a print that ultimately guides visitors towards the downstairs loo. As an adopted Manc, I’d had the full initiation into Lowry long before I saw this version. My mother-in-law’s hallway is practically a gallery of his stick-limbed crowds and smoky skylines, so I knew the original well enough: the dense geometry of mills and chimneys; the slow, almost tidal movement of workers; a sky pressed low by industry. Lowry’s Ashton is a world defined by labour, discipline and endurance.
But the reimagined version floored me. The mills remained, but the atmosphere had changed. The greys had lifted. The air was clean and on the rooftops where Lowry painted only stone, soot and shadow, there were now rows of solar panels catching a soft, deliberate light. The picture felt almost impossible at first – as if someone had taken a deep breath and exhaled colour into old industrial bones. Even the figures, in my mind’s eye, seemed lighter. Not enduring, but participating. It was the juxtaposition that did it, the deep contrast between the world Lowry painted and the one we are building now and that contrast, that tension, sits at the heart of this entire series.
What struck me most wasn’t the brightness of the new image, but what that brightness implied. Here were two paintings of the same town, separated by seventy years and an entirely different energy philosophy. The original showed a city powered from elsewhere – electricity arriving from distant stations, flowing through substations, feeding mills and terraces from a central spine. The reimagined version showed something else entirely: a city generating its own power. Solar panels across warehouses, schools, distribution centres and terraced streets – decentralised generation stitched across the landscape like a pattern Lowry never had reason to imagine. It was in that contrast, between what he captured and what we are now creating, that a larger truth began to surface.
Greater Manchester has long used the worker bee as its emblem, a symbol of industry, solidarity and the quiet magic that happens when thousands of people coordinate without needing to speak. Lowry, intentionally or not, painted that beehive. In Industrial Landscape, you can almost feel the hum of collective movement: workers flowing in one direction as if pulled by a shared gravity; mills rising like the chambers of a hive, structuring the world around them; chimneys marking the skyline in orderly ranks; life unfolding within a system everyone understood. It wasn’t the individual figures that mattered, it was the rhythm they moved to.
Behind the scene Lowry depicted lay a centralised power structure that was just as orderly as the composition on the canvas. There was one grid, one approach to training, one method for doing the work, one way to escalate faults, one culture of maintenance, one clear pattern of responsibility. Reliability didn’t come from thousands of heroic acts; it came from thousands of ordinary actions performed the same way. That is how a hive works, not through brilliance, but through coherence and coherence is a virtue we rarely speak about until the moment it goes missing.
The reimagined painting revealed a different kind of hive entirely. Now every rooftop was its own source of power. Every building be it a school, warehouse, hospital, terrace or barn was generating its own slice of energy. Where Lowry’s world depended on a single centre, ours is beginning to draw power from everywhere at once, millions of micro-hives layered over an infrastructure built for one. This is decentralisation and decentralisation is beautiful. But beauty does not replace structure.
Decentralisation introduces a tension Lowry never had to anticipate: the grid remains centralised, but generation no longer does. Planning remains centralised, but responsibility does not. Training used to be centralised; now it varies wildly. Quality control was centralised; now it depends entirely on who did the job last Tuesday. Innovation has expanded; coherence has not. The old hive had discipline but the new hive has momentum. Neither, on its own, is enough. We are living in the gap between the two, and that gap is where risk gathers.
I have spent enough of my life on both sides of the electricity landscape to understand what held the old hive together. Years inside distribution networks, system operators and control rooms leave you with a deep respect for method. Consistency was not bureaucracy; it was survival. You followed the rules not because someone demanded it, but because systems of that scale collapse when every worker becomes a free agent. You didn’t have to be exceptional, you simply had to be aligned.
Then I stepped into the decentralised world of solar development, maintenance, rooftop commissioning, field inspections and the contrast was immediate. Every site had its own personality. Every installer had their own approach. Documentation styles ranged from immaculate to non-existent, standards lagged behind practice, methods drifted, responsibility blurred. Some installations were thoughtful and elegant, engineered with real care. Others were a scramble of cable trays, mismatched connectors and well-intentioned improvisations. The engineering was often brilliant; the coordination drifted because the system had never provided a common reference point. That is when the worry began to settle in: decentralisation has enormous potential, but only if we rebuild the unseen choreography that once held the hive together.
Electricity has a habit of looping back on itself. In the beginning, power was local with street-level stations, small generators, neighbourhood feeds. Then centralisation brought efficiency, order and safety. Now we are returning to the local model with tens of thousands of miniature stations but layered onto a national grid designed for power to flow in the opposite direction. The circle is satisfying to observe, but dangerous to misread. The DNO will continue to protect the network and operate within its mandate, but everything after the cut-out now sits with industries evolving faster than the frameworks that support them.
We have re-entered the early days of electrification, but with a twenty-first century urgency and a far more complex set of expectations. The consequences of misalignment today are not quaint or local; they are systemic. Lowry painted the visible part of a transition. We are living through the invisible one beneath it.
I believe decentralised energy will work and work brilliantly. It will reshape cities, businesses and entire sectors. But only if we rediscover the quiet virtues that made the old hive reliable: shared method, shared definitions of competence, shared expectations, evidence instead of assumption, design integrity instead of improvisation and maintenance treated not as an expense but as infrastructure. These are not nostalgic ideas; they are the minimum requirements for a decentralised system to behave like a coherent one.
I am building tools to support that transition, digital infrastructure for a world of decentralised generation but tools without thinking are just software. Tools without method are just apps. Tools without coherence cannot create it. So this series, After Lowry, is my attempt to articulate the world we are building, the lessons we need to carry forward, and the risks we cannot ignore.
Lowry painted one kind of beehive. Today’s landscape is becoming another. Our task is not to choose between them. Our task is to make sure the new hive works.