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The poet Coleridge called the northern mill town a 'Sodom and Gomorrhah manufactury'. A century later George Orwell described it as 'festering in unplanned chaos'. Consuming life and nature destroying the balance between them, such towns and their satanic mills were often seen as unnatural and ungodly.

Lowry's imaginary panorama includes real elements such as the Stockport viaduct, in the upper left. It can be read as a parody of rural landscape in which chimneys replace trees or rivers power looms. A street of houses and people in the foreground suggest the survival of community in an alien land.