Macfarlane's/ Mcfarlanes Foundry

Does anyone know anything about this foundry in Wigan? Only reference I can find is to a Scottish firm of that name who were a very famous firm and made the Pavilion in Mesnes Park. Someone told me there is a manhole cover off Frog Lane that says Macfarlane Wigan.

Flaggy
The Greenock iron founders also produced the park gates and railings and bandstand iron work in Mesnes Park.
The most likely explanation re the manhole is that they were cast with the name Wigan to identify them.

A possibility?


And another!

some of them manhole covers with that name on are in beechhill estate

Thanks for responses. Sorry I haven't posted thanks earlier.

McFarlane's Foundry was off Chapel Lane on either Woods or Bradford Street, they did cast a lot of manhole covers as they can be seen at many locations around town, a onetime friend of mine worked there in the late sixties until the early seventies when I presume it closed, the council was doing a lot of demolition around there at that time to make way for those industrial units that are still there.

ayrefield, many thanks. The definitive answer.

As a 14 year old I visited Macfarlanes for a day in the school holidays. My mate, a year older, had just started his first job there piling scrap into the top of the furnace from a platform over the yard.
It was 1969 and still primitive- health and safety not yet a bother for the bosses. Two (council) workers came into the yard to empty the Macfarlane workers' chemical toilet. On the way out as they passed , looked up at us working on the platform, one said ';'I wouldn't lahk a job lahk that would tha, pal?'

the new road chapel lane runs through were foundry used to be side deromas ice cream

Thanks again to everyone who put me right with this

If you do a search for Henhurst Bridge
(at the top of this page) you will find the Agreement made in 1897 for the start of the Foundry off Chapel Lane that later became James MacFarlane & Son Ironfounders Wigan

MikeC’s Link: WW Album

‘An agreement to lease a Shed adjoining Henhurst Bridge Mill 1897’


Queen Street, Wigan


Queen Street, Wigan

There is at least 1 identical to the photo above on Whitley Crescent

The Macfarlanes of Henhurst Bridge Foundry

By Paul James McCormick

www.wiganlocalhistory.org

https://www.wiganlocalhistory.org/articles/the-macfarlane-s-of-henhurst-bridge-foundry