Wigan Pier
Local highlightA stretch of canal in Wigan with an ironic seaside name, made famous by Orwell and by a music-hall joke
Wigan Pier is a short stretch of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal just south-west of Wigan town centre. There was never a pleasure pier here. The name belonged to a coal tippler, a simple structure of curved rails at the end of a colliery tramway that ran to the canal edge, where wagons were tipped and their coal dropped straight into the waiting barges below. The joke lies in giving so plain a thing the name of a seaside attraction in a landlocked mill town.
The name was already a music-hall standard, kept alive by the comedian George Formby senior, before George Orwell borrowed it for the title of his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier, an account of poverty and working conditions in the industrial north. By the time Orwell stayed in the town in 1936 the original tippler had already gone, sold for scrap around 1929, so the pier of the title was more idea than object.
What survives today is the setting: the canal, its towpath, and the Victorian warehouses and the great bulk of Trencherfield Mill around the Wigan Pier Quarter, the focus of long-running regeneration. A modern marker stands where the tippler is thought to have been. The towpath is open and free to walk, and the canal continues east through the Wigan flight of locks and west towards Liverpool; the Leigh branch nearby links it on to the Bridgewater Canal. Wigan has two town-centre stations close by.
