This week, candidates for the Makerfield by-election were pitted against each other on screen in a debate that would answer all the important political questions. Like: “What is your favourite Wigan delicacy?”
Quick, the Northerners are on TV again! Name three pies! The clip put me in mind of a 1970 episode of Man Alive, where the BBC sent their reporters North to find out: “Is it right that people in Bury eat nothing but fish and chips?”
A few weeks earlier, in another interview, Andy Burnham referred to the constituency as a melting pot of Liverpool, Manchester, and Lancashire: “…and I love it for that”. Owing to the Northerners-must-name-meat-and-gravy-dishes clause, he then credited Scouse as his favourite dish. Many Wiganers didn’t recognise his cosmopolitan perspective, nor appreciated his stew of choice. For posterity, Wigan is as equidistant between the two cities as you’re likely to find – 17 miles from the centre of Manchester, 18 miles from the centre of Liverpool.
Only 15 miles from Liverpool as the crow flies, Ashton just about lies within the boundaries of Wigan and Greater Manchester. My former secondary school skirts the boundary lines of St Helens and Merseyside. Across the road from the school were two symbiotic but spiritually disparate sites: the first is Haydock Racecourse, the nationally notable Merseyside sporting venue; the other was Robinson’s horse supply shop.
Robinson’s shop lay on our Wigan side of the boundary, and shared its car park with parents on the school pick up. We made the car park an extension of the school – but the racecourse? We chose not to see it. It was so very Haydock, so St Helens. The supply shop was an oddity abstracted from its purpose: Why do we have a horse shop in Ashton? I’d wonder, whilst entirely aware of the racecourse. These two sites are emblematic of Ashton’s relation to Wigan, and of Wigan’s to Greater Manchester.
Just one part of the Makerfield borough, Ashton was known for its 13 collieries and for making locks and hinges. Up until the mid 90s, the centre of town housed Thomas Crompton and Sons – the hingemaking factory – which totally dominated the high street. Then the centre modernised and the factory was replaced by whatever it is we call a strip mall in the UK: a KFC, a Max Spielmanns, a Kwik Save. The previous Kwik Save site became a Wetherspoons and it would be remiss of me to gloss over another feature of the town – our excess of pubs. Joe Gormley was the President of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1971 to 1982 and in his autobiography Battered Cherub: The Autobiography of Joe Gormley he writes: “People made their own entertainment, and Ashton certainly helped them do it. It had 39 pubs – as I was to discover one by one as I got older – and about 20 clubs, Miners’ clubs, Labour clubs, Tory clubs, Working Men’s clubs, and so on…”. Indeed, a town never far from oblivion, should you want it.
As a legacy of its many coal mines, by the late 80s there were seemingly endless feral playgrounds to choose from: building sites; an abandoned train line; still-rural-seeming fields with wild, unmanicured grasses and ponds teeming with tadpoles. Billingsford Brook ran through what I suppose we’d call edgelands today – pastorally named pockets of land like Old Cookson’s Pig Farm where housing estates ran out of steam. Something about the place is just a little uncanny. Unexplained and inert fairground-style huts with fake windows besides a graveyard; the mummified holy hand of St Edmund Arrowsmith; a wildly eccentric garden and “outsider art” centre; my secondary school was once a POW camp where Man City goalkeeper Bert Trautmann was held captive; our very own hermit; and what’s thought to be the last surviving hand-painted advert for the Titanic. Ashton also has an unusually high number of unpaved, unadopted roads – a small thing, but it adds to the bizarre undercurrent.
In 2001, I met my friend Alison. She lived in neighbouring Hindley – part of the same constituency, but her world was so much more authentically… Wigan. Her uncle Walter ran the last family clog-making firm in Lancashire. When she was feeling good Alison would say she was “in fine fettle”. I felt fraudulent to my already unstable Wigan roots: this was all so removed from my experience in Ashton. To add to the lingering unmoored feeling, almost everyone refused to drop Lancashire from their address. This is all to say that I never really knew that I was a resident of Greater Manchester, and when my older brother left home and got a job in the city it was as if he had betrayed us somehow.
What was my identity? There’s something of an unofficial history which might explain the nebulous identity of Ashton that Burnham has attempted to capitalise on.
In 1974, as the last houses on our estate were sold, what had been a Lancashire town suddenly became Greater Manchester. My family are Scousers from Everton, and Woollybacks from Whiston, I was the first of my immediate family to be born in Wigan. When my dad’s family home was earmarked as part of the post-war slum clearances, they were offered an alternative of Skelmersdale or Runcorn – they chose Runcorn. My dad, hating it there, rapidly relocated to Toxteth in a marriage of convenience before meeting my mum who found herself lured in by the cheap house prices of Ashton extolled by her first husband’s family. My dad wasn’t the only slum clearance incomer. In Joe Gormley’s autobiography, he notes that: “Ashton, shorn of its pits and its mills, has become a dormitory suburb for Liverpool”.
Former slum tenants coming here had both autonomy and community. The plentiful new housing estates kept nearly-displaced neighbours and families together in a way that wasn’t guaranteed in Skelmersdale or Runcorn. The centre of Ashton was historic enough that it provided an intangible security, it had existing public transport and other well established amenities like doctors surgeries and schools, and there wasn’t a high rise, deck access development in sight: no falsely-promised utopia. The Liverpool decampment to Ashton was just a moment in a much longer history, and the 1974 redrawn boundaries of Lancashire just a social construct, so I don’t want to deny Ashton of its long Wigan history. There’s plenty of estates where the collective identity is much more traditional; the grandkids of miners in terraced housing or old cottages, but there was a significant proportion of the town which became untethered from its Wiganess.
I’ve come to hold my Wigan identity dear but it’s still a confusing part of a whole. Many of us, the children of not-quite-New Town families don’t feel Mancunian, or Liverpudlian, we’re not confidently sure of our status as Wiganers, and now we’re even tentative over how Makerfield we are (for I challenge you to find anyone who has ever identified as being part of Makerfield before this by-election).
Makerfield’s hurried media-ready identity is reductive and predictable – told through laboured puff pieces about pie fillings and mint balls. The fear that the constituency, and specifically Ashton, is merely a stepping stone to Westminster isn’t just about locals feeling left behind, but by intertwining Westminster into our story it further dilutes our identity, it muddies what we’ve struggled to establish about ourselves all these years.
When we stand on the borders of two counties, where do we belong, who are we, and what do we mean to the rest of the UK when babby’s yeds are off the table?
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