The sunny harvest scene in the foreground is a picture of rural life as it had been for centuries. Across the Ribble and Penwortham Bridge looms the darker atmosphere of industrial Preston, with its rapidly expanding streets of mills and houses.

In the early 19th century, farming was being relocated from the town centre to the green spaces outside its boundaries. The desperate need to provide housing for the rapidly expanding population meant that many of the narrow garden plots and town fields, used for centuries to grow crops, were now packed with dangerous, cramped and unsanitary houses.

Windmills are visible in the distance – Preston was an important corn-milling centre at this time – but smoking chimneys now dominate the skyline