The Road To Wigan Pier - Book Title

Book Title

Orwell was asked about Wigan Pier in a radio programme in December 1943. He replied "Well I am afraid I must tell you that Wigan Pier doesn't exist. I made a journey specially to see it in 1936 and I couldn't find it. It did exist once, however, and to judge from the photographs it must have been about twenty feet long". The original "pier" at Wigan was a coal loading staithe, probably a wooden jetty, where wagons of coal from a nearby colliery were unloaded into waiting barges on the canal. The original wooden pier is believed to have been demolished in 1929, with the iron from the tippler being sold as scrap.

Although a pier is a structure built out into the water from the shore, in Britain the term has the connotation of a seaside holiday. In the broadcast radio interview of 1943 Orwell elaborated on the name Wigan Pier: " Wigan is in the middle of the mining areas. The landscape is mostly slag-heaps Wigan has always been picked on as a symbol of the ugliness of the industrial areas. At one time, on one of the muddy little canals that run round the town, there used to be a tumble-down wooden jetty; and by way of a joke some nicknamed this Wigan Pier. The joke caught on locally, and then the music-hall comedians got hold of it, and they are the ones who have succeeded in keeping Wigan Pier alive as a byword."

Geographically, Wigan Pier is the name given today to the area around the canal at the bottom of the Wigan flight of locks on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.