New Wigan waterfront homes take shape

WORK is well under way on the latest scheme to regenerate the area alongside the Leeds & Liverpool Canal in the Wigan ‘Pier Quarter’.

New modular town houses are being built at the Seven Stars end of the site and there will be eight of them when they are all in place.

This area used to be occupied by a canalside garden and a sanitary station for boaters. There was also a display area telling some of the history of the canal and included a retired ‘Bantam’ tug boat, launched in April 1953.

It has now been moved to a storage yard with its future uncertain.

The old warehouse building is being refurbished; the canopy that protected boats being loaded and unloaded has been removed and holes made in the wash walls to build a new section of over-thewater decking.

These former warehouses had previously been part of the Way We Were museum about Victorian life that closed in 2007.

The canalside buildings are on the opposite bank to the coal loading point, immortalised by George Orwell’s graphic 1937 description of the plight of the working class in his book The Road to Wigan Pier.

Work was due to be completed by March 2020 but was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.

New modular homes being built opposite Wigan Pier.

PHOTOS: COLIN WAREING/COLIN AND CAROLE’S CREATIONS Regeneration work on the warehouses. In the foreground is the modern representation of the coal staithe that was there when the barges loaded with coal were brought from local mines by railway trucks.