Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  The average weekly wage in Wilmslow in 2007, according to a report from the Office of National Statistics, was £772, compared to the poorest area of the North-West, the Manchester district of Gorton, where the average was £403. That would seem to confirm the image of Wilmslow as an exclusive enclave for the elite. But you could also interpret those figures as suggesting that the gap between rich and poor areas is much less than might be imagined. Because while the average company director makes fifteen times as much as the average of his employees, investment bankers and the real rich can make more in bonuses in a single year than the people who clean their office earn in a lifetime. So you might expect the difference between Wilmslow’s average and that of a poor borough of Manchester to be much wider.

  This should be even more likely when you think that that average must include Wayne Rooney and friends. If you took a few dozen comically rich superstars out of the statistics the gap would be smaller still. Every rich area has its working-class quarter, just as every poor town has a rich bit. The divide between rich and poor is much less a conflict between areas than one within areas.

  Perhaps an area can seem to be dominated by wealth more than it really is, because a handful of rich people have a disproportionate bearing on the look of a place. The shops will cater for them, because they’re the ones who have the money to spend. A country road on which ten millionaires live is an area swimming in wealth, whereas ten people on the minimum wage wouldn’t fill a single house converted into bedsits. The restaurants, beauty salons and purple-jacket shops tend to the needs of the richer section of the community. So you end up with a place that, in some ways, must be even more frustrating to live in if you’re on a low income. Because on the way to work you have to pass an Aston Martin showroom and a shop selling jackets for £1,800 plus VAT, and even if you’re driven to burglary you’re likely to get walloped with a bat signed by Andrew Flintoff.

  Wigan

  A few miles from the media rooms and glass floors of Wilmslow is the slight contrast of Wigan, where I sensed that the old couple hunched in the tea bar in the indoor market didn’t trust us. All around were the props and costumes you’d lay out if you wanted to make a film set in 1971, maybe involving a detective trying to get information out of a trader who sold knocked-off kettles. Above each stall was an old green or brown board with the owner’s name painted by hand, in the sort of font used for Olde English Marmalade and by companies who want to convince you the stuff they stew in a vat in an industrial estate in Kent was made by a farmer’s wife with a rolling pin, who says, ‘Right, that’s today’s cherry pies for Marks and Spencer in St Albans sorted, now I’ll just take round the vicar’s gooseberries and I can get on with Mrs Finlay’s plum crumble portions for Budgens in Exeter.’

  These signs usually suggest that you’ll be offered a small dish of hand-picked olives stuffed with low-fat organic Tuscan soil at £30 an ounce, or stilton mixed with conkers packed in the sort of fancy box you’d use for a wedding ring. But in Wigan they don’t need to artificially recreate the chic individuality of pre-industrial shopping. These stalls really have been there for a hundred years. If any designers for farmers’ markets were to wander in they’d clap their hands and shriek, ‘Oh, how rustic! It’s so authentic!’

  There are countless racks of kids’ dresses, and shirts for four quid, and a record stall with a range from Hot Chocolate to Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Top of the Pops albums. There’s a stall selling sherbet by the ounce and stuck-together pear drops, and a café with rickety chairs that belong in a primary school, that only sells lobby, which is a stew with potatoes that looks as if it’s been made at a camp by scouts.

  And there’s a tea bar, that sells tea from a huge green metal pot with the enamel flaking off, in huge white mugs. As we sat slurping in contentment the old couple, wrapped in so many scarves and hats and coats and jumpers that if a madman had gone berserk with a rifle they’d have been perfectly safe as no bullet could penetrate all those layers, glared at us as if we were occupying troops in full uniform. The man nodded in our direction and said with utter disdain, ‘Manchester thespians.’

  If I’d gone across and told him I was from even further away than Manchester he’d have said, ‘Surely not Stockport, you pouf.’

  Outside this market is the pedestrianised centre of Wigan, indistinguishable from the centre of anywhere else. The building societies, W.H. Smith and anti-vivisection campaigners are all in their designated places, and it’s by a door opposite Clinton Cards that you pass through a magical vortex into the market, a world that hasn’t so much resisted modern corporate life as remained unaware that it exists. Maybe that’s because for a century or more Wigan fitted the notion of what was considered a working-class town better than anywhere, so that when George Orwell wrote his study of working-class life, it was Wigan he went to live in, to see what the proles get up to.

  The pier that provides the title of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier is a slightly raised step, about two feet long, on one side of the Leeds–Liverpool canal, from where coal was once tipped into the barges. The area alongside the canal used to be packed with one of the greatest concentrations of mills in the country. One of those mills, just behind the pier, became a mill museum, but now that’s shut down as well. You can’t get more working-class than that. Presumably the actors who had to walk round dressed as Victorian loom operators went home one day and said, ‘Bad news I’m afraid. There’s trouble at Mill Experience.’ Now they’ll have to hope that someone invests in a museum about what it used to be like working in the museum.

  Opposite the pier is a factory that anywhere else would have been converted into offices or flats or a restaurant, but that turns out still to be a factory. It makes Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls, the pride of Wigan. According to the logo, the mint balls will ‘Keep you all aglow’, and there’s a picture of Uncle Joe looking like your favourite uncle in a top hat, and you think you remember skipping down the street in short trousers with the sixpence you got for polishing Mr Higginbottom’s Austin Rover to buy a pack of mint balls, which were not only the finest sweets but back then were believed to prevent whooping cough.

  The mint balls are defiantly Wigan, and I imagine the old couple from the market would be astonished if they met someone who’d never heard of them, as if they’d said they’d never heard of a banana.

  No doubt the place is just as proud of its mint balls as it was of the Wigan man declared to be the fattest person in Britain. Eventually he couldn’t get out of his specially made seat, and relied on his wife, who, once it was confirmed he held the record, boasted about it to all her neighbours – ‘He’s the fattest in Britain now, you know’ – and showed them all the newspaper clippings that confirmed this triumph. It turned out she’d only met him after reading about his size in the local paper, and decided to make him her own. When he died the windows had to be removed so he could be hoisted through them, as there was no way he was getting through the door. A neighbour I spoke to, who’d never met him, was asked by his wife to go the funeral. When she said she was sorry, but she really couldn’t make it, the wife said with astonishment, ‘But he was the fattest man in Britain.’

  Even the irresistible force of the Premier League has stumbled in its attempt to overwhelm Wigan as it does most places. Despite the local side having been in the top division for the past six seasons, the crowds are smaller than for the rugby league team.

  So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the historical local hero, commemorated with a statue in the centre of town and his picture on all the official leaflets for local events, is George Formby. If Wigan’s most famous figure was a prominent physicist or an influential Pre-Raphaelite painter it would be a terrible let-down, like finding out that your great-grandfather was a pimp.

  George Formby was a buck-toothed banjolele player who sang slightly saucy songs with lyrics such as ‘If you could see what I can see, when I’m cleaning windows’. It’s unlikely that any of his songs will ever be covered by 50
Cent, but he was a super-star who people from a place like Wigan could identify with, who they could imagine bumping into at the pub. This image went beyond Wigan, as he became hugely popular in Soviet Russia, and it was even rumoured that Stalin had awarded him the Order of Lenin. This would presumably have irritated the odd Soviet commander, who might have lived through the siege of Leningrad for two years living off earthworms and fighting the Nazis using whittled toenail clippings as weapons, only to lag in the queue for a medal behind a banjolele player from Wigan. The story of the medal was an exaggeration, but there was something about Formby that was the embodiment of Wigan, not just working-class but unashamedly so. Otherwise how could he have sung a song called ‘The Wigan Express’ that went ‘She got some shocks in her signal box’?

  In 1946, when he toured pre-apartheid South Africa, he upset his hosts by refusing to play segregated venues. As a result a black member of one audience presented Formby’s wife Beryl with a box of chocolates, and George gave the man a hug. National Party leader Daniel François Malan, who would introduce apartheid two years later, heard about this and phoned Beryl to complain, to which she replied, ‘Why don’t you piss off, you horrible little man?’

  At first the idea of George Formby and his wife as radical anti-apartheid activists seems as surreal as finding out that Bobby Davro spent five years as a guerrilla fighting with Che Guevara, but in a way it symbolises Wigan’s history as an apparently jolly working-class town getting by without complaining, but with a calm commitment to rebellion underneath. In 1779 cotton workers in Wigan staged one of Britain’s first riots against unemployment. It lasted for several days, until the militia was brought in from Liverpool. The area was at the centre of the Lancashire Luddite riots, and in 1842 a strike of spinners ended up in a battle with two companies of riflemen.

  The first miners’ strike of the twentieth century was in Wigan, in 1921 Wigan miners rioted until dispersed by the 16th Hussars, and the local pits were influential in every national strike. It feels as if a Wigan historian might say, ‘Ee, I’ll not call it proper decade if we’ve not been fired on by yeomen or suchlike.’

  All this may make Wigan an unlikely setting for a vegan pagan café run by warlocks and called the Coven, but it was right opposite the main station. The warlocks greeted you with the most unsettling behaviour warlocks could manage, by being disconcertingly normal. ‘Hello love, right windy today, isn’t it? How about a piping-hot mug of elderflower-and-nettle tea to warm them bones up?’ one of them said.

  The place was cluttered with sticks of incense, dream catchers and models of black cats, and there was a cheery sign informing you they’d cast a spell for you if you liked, in that chirpy lettering that looks as if it’s been written by a neat ten-year-old to be put on the classroom wall. But somehow warlocks seem palatable when they’re working-class and from Wigan. They were warm and neighbourly warlocks, always likely to nip in to see old Elsie on the way home, as she’s getting on and can be a bit forgetful, and one night when she’d forgotten to get any food for her cat, the friendly warlock turned it into stone until the morning so it wouldn’t get hungry.

  Sometimes they were disappointingly normal, just bringing you a coffee when you were hoping they’d break into a naked fertility dance. But one Saturday afternoon in the Coven, with my daughter and her friend, we were waiting for our drinks by the upstairs window while flicking through a folder of common hexes. Suddenly the girls said, ‘Wow, look at that!’ A group of men had rushed out onto the street from the Wetherspoon’s pub next door. One of them was on crutches, and he made four agile bounds before deftly swinging them onto the back of someone he must have had a disagreement with on some issue. The street quickly became a battlefield. ‘Someone should do something,’ said the owner of the café. Presumably he’d run out of the potion that deals with a mass crutch-wielding brawl, or at least shrinks the fighters to the size of mice, so they don’t hold up the traffic.

  It was almost as if the fighters were making a statement, that you can sit somewhere fancy and pagan if you like, but you can’t escape the real Wigan.

  The place where the real Wigan meets the world of chain-company uniformity head on, where the greatest imagination has been displayed in the quest to eliminate imagination, is King Street, which is made up entirely of nightclubs. This isn’t a seedy quarter with bands playing under railway arches, and shirtless DJs scratching from what was once an office in a converted tinned-pudding warehouse. There are twelve clubs in a row, including Walkabout, Revolution, and a fake Irish place. The road is blocked to traffic, and outside each entrance a pair of bald men in black suits act as sentries, so you feel a sense of relief and smug achievement if you get in at all. At the first one we were told sternly by the bald men that it was open until 6 a.m. This information was conveyed with the sort of chilling menace with which I expect guards at Abu Ghraib said ‘You’ll be in here until 6 a.m.’ to prisoners as they were being shown into a room full of rusty implements.

  Then we were looked up and down and searched, and it felt as if we might be taken into a small, bare room to be interviewed by an official while a man in a white shirt stood silently behind us holding an unsettled Alsatian on a short lead.

  Eventually they let us pay £2 each and rubbed a blurry inkstain onto the backs of our hands. Triumphant, we marched through the huge wooden doors of a glorious Victorian building, that could have been an embassy if Wigan was ever a country, into the split-level dance floor, past a flashing semi-circular bar and a machine pumping out dry ice. Having looked round thoroughly, it was clear that we were the only people there. After a couple of club mix versions of songs I thought I recognised but probably didn’t, four more people came in, but it turned out they were security.

  It was tempting to stay until 6 a.m., but instead we went to a nineties club, where about twenty people danced to ‘Wiggle Wiggle’ and Bobby Brown, including someone dressed in a blue all-body gimp outfit with one hole to breathe through. But the most disturbing thing about the place was the overwhelming stench of cleaning products. Was this a new trend, clubs that are renowned for their excessive cleanliness, with a promise that every surface will be polished with Pledge every seven minutes? At the bar it seemed natural to ask for a pint of Jif with a Toilet Duck chaser, and the carpet oozed the aroma of an office to let that’s been abused with too much Shake ’n’ Vac, which was a mistake, as that was definitely a symbol of the eighties, not the nineties.

  The best-known chains seemed to be the most popular. Walkabout was the sweatiest, and unlike our first venue you couldn’t practise chipping golf balls across the room without any fear of irritating someone. But as we strolled up the street past the bare thighs and gelled hair, across the pavement that was ready to receive the night’s vomit, I was sort of jealous. How I would have loved, when I was twenty, to have had a street where you were not only allowed but virtually ordered to drink until any time you liked, with hundreds of women in attendance enabling you to dream that at any moment this week you might have a brief conversation with one of them.

  But there’s something lacking in a street that regiments adolescent disorderliness. It’s like a board put up by the council for people to graffiti on. The whole point of drinking and dancing late is to feel slightly seedy, to be aware that you’re gyrating or slumped against a fruit machine while respectable society is fast asleep. Once it’s sanctioned, contained, sanitised and run by chains that have a brand image to convey, it’s lost its edge. It’s predictable, as the Arctic Monkeys say. After all that anticipation, ‘All that happened is you drank a lot.’

  Worse than encouraging binge drinking, this is a top-down, orchestrated encouragement of corporate binge drinking, the vodkas and tequila slammers arranged according to the demands of a study group that discussed its findings using a PowerPoint display in a room overlooking the Thames in Reading.

  Maybe this is more poignant in the home of northern soul, the scene driven from the bottom up that led thousands to hitch and
cajole lifts across the country every week in the 1970s to venues such as the Wigan Casino. There’s no generally accepted theory as to why this started, why a lobby-eating, overwhelmingly white corner of north-west England became the centre of a music scene that originated in the black districts of Detroit. But northern soul became a whole category of music, as much as ska or speed garage, revolving around Wigan and fuelled by the thousands who went there, rather than by the desires of leisure-centre-industry shareholders, and who took drugs and danced and then hitched home to Essex or Devon. The trend faded away in the eighties, but there are still posters in the King Street nightclubs for monthly northern soul sessions that take place, for some reason, in the afternoon, as if it’s a modern version of a tea dance, in which a lady comes round with a trolley and asks, ‘Would you like an upper with your tea, Mrs Bottomley?’ and is told, ‘Oo no, dear, I had two doses of speed yesterday, any more will give me terrible indigestion.’

  So one of Wigan’s most unlikely achievements is that the town that had already contributed to international music by propelling the banjolele across Soviet Russia became the heart of a global music scene, attracting soul legends such as Edwin Starr, who sat a few yards from the pies and lobby and the mint-ball factory, across the road from the indoor market, and if he popped in for a cup of tea he probably risked the disapproval of a middle-aged couple who’ll have looked him up and down and muttered, ‘Student from Bolton, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  Horwich

  The generalisation that all Londoners are grisly and unfriendly while northerners whistle all day and give away their houses to strangers is clearly a myth. But there are plenty who insist that this irrational idea is true. You could cite any example as evidence to the contrary, and they’d say something like, ‘Yes, but at least the Yorkshire Ripper would lend his neighbours a cup of marmalade, even on the morning of a murder.’