A friend of many years.

Walter Kershaw, Lancashire painter of street murals who was dubbed ‘the LS Lowry of urban art’
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Walter Kershaw, who has died aged 85, was a pioneering street artist later dubbed “the original Banksy”, whose large murals could be found dotted around Lancashire mill towns in the 1970s and 1980s.

Working within a depressed industrial landscape allowed Kershaw to explore new ways of connecting with an audience, giving birth to an art form that could be regarded as democratic in the purest sense. He brightened derelict mills and disused public lavatories with a colour palette of sky blue and sunset reds and yellows. His paintings would occupy the whole side of a house and riffed on popular culture as much as they did classical landscapes by 17th-century artists. The radio critic Gillian Reynolds declared him “​the LS Lowry of urban art”.

Kershaw’s blending of high and low influences aligned him with the Pop Art movement of the 1950s and 1960s, but his approach was grounded in the principles of the fine artist. He would play with illusions of depth and scale, as with The Inside-Out House (1975), which depicted a cross-section of a domestic scene, as though the wall itself had been removed. Another mural, on the outside of the North Western Museum of Science & Industry, also revealed the objects to be found within, such as the spinning jenny.

At the beginning of his career Kershaw employed guerrilla tactics to get his murals installed. He started early, around 5am in the summer, and travelled with a friend on a motorbike in case someone took violent exception to his work. Often in this period he worked with Eric Kean. In time, the art world came to recognise the value of what he was doing. From 1977-79 he received a major gra​nt, jointly financed by the Gulbenkian Foundation and North West Arts, to pursue his external painting.

Kershaw’s tendency to select condemned or abandoned buildings meant that few of his early murals survived into the 1990s. That ephemeral nature – arising from supposedly solid foundations of brick – was really the point, and throughout his career Kershaw harnessed both happy accidents and strokes of misfortune in the creation of his art.

Often he would add a whimsical touch. A view of a magic carpet on the wall of a house in Rochdale was surrounded by bollards painted to look like people. A 2012 mural commissioned for the Coach House in Littleborough depicted a Victorian gentleman seated next to the footballer Fernando Torres.

Though his work was not political in the sense later understood by those in the street art movement, there was always something of the radical about Kershaw. Interviewing him for the BBC in 2012, Mark Hodkinson asked if he would like to apply his methodology to contemporary buildings. “I don’t want to prettify them,” Kershaw replied. “I want to blow them up.”

Walter Kershaw was born in Rochdale on December 7 1940. His father, also called Walter, had joined the RAF a few years before the outbreak of war and served as a Flight Sergeant in the Battle of Britain. His mother Florence, née Ward, worked as a school caterer.

After De La Salle College the younger Walter studied fine art at the University of Durham, taking a particular interest in the Renaissance pai​nters and Dutch artists of the 17th century. Upon graduating he established himself as a conventional painter of landscapes and had works purchased by the Victoria and Albert Museum. At the same time he experimented with sculpting in fibreglass, producing life-size human figures intended for outdoor display.

In 1971 he was commissioned to produce a miniature bronze figure group of George Best, Bobby Charlton and Denis Law. Best became an admirer and personal friend and purchased six large drawings from him while playing for Manchester United.

Kershaw’s work began to take on a grander scale after he moved to Littleborough in 1972 and acquired a panoramic studio. He produced murals for the University of Salford and British Aerospace and began receiving commissions from abroad. As his respectability increased, so did his public profile. Kershaw was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg for a documentary and Sue MacGregor for Radio 4.

By far his largest project was for the east wall of Victoria warehouse in Trafford Park. Completed in 1982, it measured 5,000 square feet and featured images of the businesses on the industrial estate, alongside players from Manchester United. A second version re​placed it in 1993, then was itself dismantled in 2007 after its panels were deemed unsafe.

Kershaw’s career crashed to a halt in 2013, after a court found that he had conducted a stalking campaign against a former girlfriend and her mother. He was given a restraining order but was convicted of breaching it in 2015 and given a 16-week jail sentence, suspended for two years. In 2021 he was finally jailed for four years.

Walter Kershaw, who was twice married and twice divorced, had two children with Gillian Halliwell.

​​Walter Kershaw, born December 7 1940, died September 6 2026