Preparatory Drawing for ‘Brown Street’ and its finished counterpart, Brown Street, serve as a record of Warrington on the cusp of change. Although the street has since been redeveloped — with Golden Square Shopping Centre and Midland Way across the railway line significantly altering the area — Janice Hayes, a committed chronicler of Warrington’s history, was able to pinpoint its original location using a late 19th-century map. Hayes posits that the tower on the left of the composition is a loose rendering of Holy Trinity Church, while the building behind the right-hand lamppost, with its distinctive stepped upper gable and contrasting brownish lower storey, was a pub called the Blue Back Inn, located on Allen Street.

Viewed together, the preparatory drawing and the oil offer valuable insight into Tucker’s working process. The drawing captures the underlying structure of the street, while in the painting, the composition is reimagined with a renewed sense of dynamism: the public utility hut in the middle ground on the left acquires a curved, jaunty roofline; the lampposts are elongated; and the compression of space brings the background architecture closer to the viewer. The figures also undergo a transformation. Rather than repeating those in the drawing, Tucker introduces a fresh array of characters — including a dog, shoppers with their trolleys, and families — whose interactions enliven the street. Likely drawn from his pen portraits of Warrington’s residents, these figures are seamlessly integrated, resulting in two works that record not only the buildings before their redevelopment, but also a snapshot of the town’s population.