Wigan Pier.
Once the butt of music hall jokes in the 20th century was orginaly a a coal loading staithe where wagons from a nearby pit would unload the coal onto canal boats.
The orginal pier which was made out of wood is thought to have been demolished in around 1929.
It came to the attention of most people with George Orwells " Road To Wigan Pier" which was a book about working class life in the north and has refrences to wigan of course within the book with areas such as Scholes,Whelley and wallgate getting references within the book.
The link between Wigan and Orwell has given the area some form of torisum but some people think it highlights the bad points of the town despite it is the one thing that it is famous for ( and it pains me to say it..Rugby League...)
"I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the ‘flashes’ — pools of stagnant water that had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly cold. The ‘flashes’ were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water."
The slag heaps have gone, the factory's have become derelict or become part of modern housing schemes but the Orwell link is still here in the town.
The site which is Wigan Pier is today a tourist attraction along with which is know modern flats trenchfield mill. The pier has a Victorian school with teachers in period dress and also what life down the pits was like.
The pier in a sorry state. Note the wood is still there and Trenchfield mill in the background is still there but is modern flats.
The pier as it looks today, note that the Orwell pub ( a reffrence to George Orwell) has been closed down ( R.I.P )
