REPRINT: Back on the road to Wigan Pier -- 80 years after George Orwell’s classic
by Dean Kirby March 10, 2017
Caption: George Orwell's son Richard Blair at Wigan Pier.
It is Friday morning in Wigan and the last surviving tripe stall in the former coal town’s red-brick market hall is already busy with customers. Stallholder Denise Webster is the only seller of this old Lancashire delicacy – the stomach lining of animals – for many miles around. “We used to sell pig belly and cowheal as well, but it’s too expensive now,” she says, “Tripe has gone up to £3.20 a pound, but it’s still very popular. We sell 50 kilos of it every week. It’s very good for you.” The bustle around the market stall is something George Orwell might have recognised when he travelled here in the 1930s while writing The Road to Wigan Pier – the classic account of social conditions in Northern England during the Depression. He stayed just a few hundred yards from the market in a lodging house above a tripe shop, which sold “great white folds” of the stuff alongside the “ghostly translucent feet of pigs, already boiled”.
Caption: Wigan's last tripe seller Denise Webster. She sells 50kg a week and believes Wiganers are the best people.
But times have changed since Orwell’s book was published 80 years ago this week and after he wrote of “labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping round them like blackbeetles”. Modern Wigan is, in fact, a global leader in food production and more than three-quarters of the world’s top 25 companies have their base here – helping boost the town’s £4.2bn economy. It is also the greenest metropolitan borough in Britain, a legacy of the once great mining industry witnessed by Orwell, as former coalfields have now become havens for wildlife. But concern about the dreaded Means Test of the 1930s has been replaced by concern about the Government’s austerity agenda in this rugby league town, which has been electing Labour MPs since 1918. In 2010, Wigan Council received the third worst budget cuts for any local authority in the country. By 2020, the council budget will have been cut by £160m, with concern here as elsewhere in the North about the future of services and social care. “The Road to Wigan Pier has had a mixed legacy for Wigan,” says the town’s Labour MP Lisa Nandy, reflecting on the book’s legacy. “But then, as now, it was important that the reality of life for many people in towns like ours is exposed. ”The book brilliantly highlights the hardship Wigan experienced, but doesn’t really do justice to our many strengths, of which the biggest is still our warm, friendly hardworking people. “Austerity has hit Wigan hard. We’ve faced some of the biggest cuts in the country and many people have to rely more and more on charity. ”Huge cuts to public services have had an effect on our local economy, but even so we’ve created apprenticeships, and many people have set up their own businesses. “We are really proud of the fighting spirit of this town, but too often we are thriving despite the Government and not because of it.”
The real-life Wigan Pier, a former coal loading jetty on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, whose name started out as a music hall joke, is now the town’s flagship regeneration project. The council has a vision for transforming the buildings, including the former Orwell pub and the Way We Were museum into an “urban quarter” for business and pleasure. George Orwell’s son Richard Blair, 72, the patron of the Orwell Society, looks out over the water at Wigan Pier today while visiting the town for events to mark the book’s 80th anniversary.
Caption: Richard Blair
“It was a very honest book,” he says. “My father came to Wigan and reported honestly on what he saw. I think the conditions in those days were poor not just in Wigan but everywhere. ”It was simply a title he came up with, but unfortunately it became a metaphor for social problems in any industrialised town. That was never intended by him.“ He says Wigan, like other towns, has done the best it could to re-invent itself since the 1930s, adding that it is impossible to say what Orwell would have thought of the town today. ”Some people say my father did Wigan a disservice,“ he adds, ”but I think that’s rather untrue. He liked the people very much, especially the miners. He thought they were extraordinarily tough, friendly, resilient people.“
Caption: Children at play in Wigan in the 1930s.
Across town in Victoria Street, which is lined with terraced houses, parishioners from St Mark’s Church are reminiscing about the old days as they gather for a women’s fellowship meeting. It was here that Orwell found ”clean decent people“ stuck in back-to-back houses with a ”filthy, miry alley“, who had to walk 50 yards to reach a lavatory. ‘I’m very proud of Wigan’ ”I was brought up around here,“ says Mavis Lees, 72. ”It’s changed over the years, but the church has always been here and we have the park across the road. I’m very proud of Wigan and, whenever I go on holiday, I always like coming home.“ Jean Lancaster, 83, adds: ”There used to be a pub on every corner here and the streets were full of houses. All the mill girls would walk along the road arm in arm. The streets were alive back then, but it’s still a nice place to live.“ The lodging house where Orwell stayed in a room that ”stank like a ferret’s cage“ is long gone after Wigan’s former slum houses were torn down decades ago. But back at the stall on the market, customers are still buying supplies of tripe ahead of the weekend as they have always done, along with traditional black puddings, pies and ham on the bone. ”I’d like to see more investment in Wigan,“ stallholder Denise Webster says. ”But we’ve had some good news recently and the market is going to be done up. “Wigan is a good place to live. You can’t go wrong with a Wiganer. They’re are very friendly. On the market, it’s always service with a smile.”
Originally published at: https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/uk/80-years-since-george-orwell-wrote-road-wigan-pier/
by Dean Kirby March 10, 2017
Caption: George Orwell's son Richard Blair at Wigan Pier.
It is Friday morning in Wigan and the last surviving tripe stall in the former coal town’s red-brick market hall is already busy with customers. Stallholder Denise Webster is the only seller of this old Lancashire delicacy – the stomach lining of animals – for many miles around. “We used to sell pig belly and cowheal as well, but it’s too expensive now,” she says, “Tripe has gone up to £3.20 a pound, but it’s still very popular. We sell 50 kilos of it every week. It’s very good for you.” The bustle around the market stall is something George Orwell might have recognised when he travelled here in the 1930s while writing The Road to Wigan Pier – the classic account of social conditions in Northern England during the Depression. He stayed just a few hundred yards from the market in a lodging house above a tripe shop, which sold “great white folds” of the stuff alongside the “ghostly translucent feet of pigs, already boiled”.
Caption: Wigan's last tripe seller Denise Webster. She sells 50kg a week and believes Wiganers are the best people.
But times have changed since Orwell’s book was published 80 years ago this week and after he wrote of “labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping round them like blackbeetles”. Modern Wigan is, in fact, a global leader in food production and more than three-quarters of the world’s top 25 companies have their base here – helping boost the town’s £4.2bn economy. It is also the greenest metropolitan borough in Britain, a legacy of the once great mining industry witnessed by Orwell, as former coalfields have now become havens for wildlife. But concern about the dreaded Means Test of the 1930s has been replaced by concern about the Government’s austerity agenda in this rugby league town, which has been electing Labour MPs since 1918. In 2010, Wigan Council received the third worst budget cuts for any local authority in the country. By 2020, the council budget will have been cut by £160m, with concern here as elsewhere in the North about the future of services and social care. “The Road to Wigan Pier has had a mixed legacy for Wigan,” says the town’s Labour MP Lisa Nandy, reflecting on the book’s legacy. “But then, as now, it was important that the reality of life for many people in towns like ours is exposed. ”The book brilliantly highlights the hardship Wigan experienced, but doesn’t really do justice to our many strengths, of which the biggest is still our warm, friendly hardworking people. “Austerity has hit Wigan hard. We’ve faced some of the biggest cuts in the country and many people have to rely more and more on charity. ”Huge cuts to public services have had an effect on our local economy, but even so we’ve created apprenticeships, and many people have set up their own businesses. “We are really proud of the fighting spirit of this town, but too often we are thriving despite the Government and not because of it.”
The real-life Wigan Pier, a former coal loading jetty on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, whose name started out as a music hall joke, is now the town’s flagship regeneration project. The council has a vision for transforming the buildings, including the former Orwell pub and the Way We Were museum into an “urban quarter” for business and pleasure. George Orwell’s son Richard Blair, 72, the patron of the Orwell Society, looks out over the water at Wigan Pier today while visiting the town for events to mark the book’s 80th anniversary.
Caption: Richard Blair
“It was a very honest book,” he says. “My father came to Wigan and reported honestly on what he saw. I think the conditions in those days were poor not just in Wigan but everywhere. ”It was simply a title he came up with, but unfortunately it became a metaphor for social problems in any industrialised town. That was never intended by him.“ He says Wigan, like other towns, has done the best it could to re-invent itself since the 1930s, adding that it is impossible to say what Orwell would have thought of the town today. ”Some people say my father did Wigan a disservice,“ he adds, ”but I think that’s rather untrue. He liked the people very much, especially the miners. He thought they were extraordinarily tough, friendly, resilient people.“
Caption: Children at play in Wigan in the 1930s.
Across town in Victoria Street, which is lined with terraced houses, parishioners from St Mark’s Church are reminiscing about the old days as they gather for a women’s fellowship meeting. It was here that Orwell found ”clean decent people“ stuck in back-to-back houses with a ”filthy, miry alley“, who had to walk 50 yards to reach a lavatory. ‘I’m very proud of Wigan’ ”I was brought up around here,“ says Mavis Lees, 72. ”It’s changed over the years, but the church has always been here and we have the park across the road. I’m very proud of Wigan and, whenever I go on holiday, I always like coming home.“ Jean Lancaster, 83, adds: ”There used to be a pub on every corner here and the streets were full of houses. All the mill girls would walk along the road arm in arm. The streets were alive back then, but it’s still a nice place to live.“ The lodging house where Orwell stayed in a room that ”stank like a ferret’s cage“ is long gone after Wigan’s former slum houses were torn down decades ago. But back at the stall on the market, customers are still buying supplies of tripe ahead of the weekend as they have always done, along with traditional black puddings, pies and ham on the bone. ”I’d like to see more investment in Wigan,“ stallholder Denise Webster says. ”But we’ve had some good news recently and the market is going to be done up. “Wigan is a good place to live. You can’t go wrong with a Wiganer. They’re are very friendly. On the market, it’s always service with a smile.”
Originally published at: https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/uk/80-years-since-george-orwell-wrote-road-wigan-pier/
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