Photo-a-Day  (Thursday, 1st May, 2025)

It looks a bit grim on that dull day you took the photo Dennis but I was in town yesterday, all the leaves are on the trees and Standishgate and Market Place looked bright and fresh in glorious sunshine and the shoppers were out in droves. I’ve not seen it so busy in years.
All those big name retailers be gone but that’s the same everywhere.
There is scaffolding up everywhere to either renovate or rebuild and the revitalisation is well underway.
I’ve put the pessimism behind me, the former Woolworths building is being converted and so is the Debenhams store and more retailers are taking up vacant shops.
Once the new Market Hall, Multimedia Centre and Hotel are up and running I am sure Market Street and Mesnes Street will see a change.
Although I still think it a mistake to demolish the existing Market Hall,
The future is bright, the future is Wigan, spread the good news.

I got talking to a lady in Skipton yesterday who had lived there for many years but was originally from Wigan. She asked me what it is like now. I told her to stay with her memories as it's getting like one of those towns in a cowboy film with buildings made from scenery and tumbleweed blowing down Standishgate.

I don't live in Wigan so perhaps its not for me to comment but.....
If you look at which political party is ''running '' this country of ours....& then take a look at what Party dominates WMC ...what can you expect?
You are paying for their dreams....there I have said it.

I agree Irene, I will be ( very pleasantly) surprised if the town ever recovers to anything like what has been promised.

Irene do not exaggerate its not tumble weed but litter blowing around our ghost town. Is this a new picture with scaffold at the front of B&M again?

I agree with Colin, there has been to much doom and gloom on pad in recent times. Wigan has still so much to offer, history, beautiful buildings spectacular scenery and the best Rugby team in the world. Talk the town up not constantly dragging it down.

It makes my blood boil, when people who say they never go to Wigan, say nobody goes, I am with Colin. I was in town yesterday and there certainly wasn’t any tumbleweed in Standishgate. It was heaving with people , very busy. If Wigan doesn’t move with the times, we get left behind. At least Wigan council are trying to.

I have to say it...is a B&M store worth a prominent position ? Hardly what you might call upmarket !
Ah well....

Why is it always doom and gloom on here lately?
You Wiganers should be looking on the bright side and complimenting what Wigan has got, like our splendid refurbished Mesnes Park, the new DW football and Rugby stadiums, the new bus station, newly refurbished canal towpaths, and the new multi-use paths created from the old derelict industrial railway lines.
And we will soon have a very modern state of the heart town centre that the younger generations of Wigans will love.
As for Skipton, forget about it, to many cars and to many gorpey looking tourists.
The chippy might be good, but expensive, and you can go anywhere in Yorkshire and you will find better chippies than Wigans chippery.

I can see “ Hope” in the sign on the photo ..lets
“Hope does spring eternal” All I see is drab and dreary at the moment. It’s the same in Bolton and most places. Yet small places where I live is buzzing.

Good God, Wiganer’s are a bunch of moaners, I was also in the town centre yesterday and considering it was Wednesday it was buzzing with people and the town looked picture perfect. God knows what people think reading these comments who have never been. It’s enough to put anybody off.

Rather ironic that the one word showing in the picture is "HOPE". I don't think so.!

High quality paving apparently laid by low quality paviors, it looks appalling

PeterP, the scaffolding has been up for some time. I hope they’re going to repaint the upper level and reinstate the flag pole.

Helen, you are one of us and you have every right to comment ; it's lovely that you join in p-a-d and keep in touch with your old home town and your comments are always fair and interesting.

The scaffolding was up for a long time….then came down ….and now back up again….nothing to do with revamping it….the facade is apparently dangerous…that B and M is an awful shop inside and out…the owners should be ashamed….as well as the coffee shops along Standishgate…IMO

The town centre is a wreck. Standishgate, Mesnes Street, Market Street, New Market Street are nothing more than one huge building site and have been for years now. Wallgate is a shambles and so is King Street. The only place in Wigan worth visiting at the moment is Wigan Park.
Given the Council’s past record it’s not surprising that some people view the future with trepidation.

I suppose most people in Wigan town centre are the ones who live nearby. There’s bound to be some people who can’t go anywhere else.
There’s not much for the older generation but it’s obvious they aren’t a priority. Sadly. I used to come at least 3 times a week now it might be once in a while I know many people who don’t come into Wigan or Bolton which is worse than the state of Wigan.
The Park is wonderful but how many people would come on a bus just to go to the Park? Or the Football stadium? Or the Canal paths? I find more enjoyment in my adopted town these days and Middlebrook beckons twice a week…plus M&S have plans to enlarge even further. Not much call for Wigan for me I’m afraid.

It’s not often I agree with Mick, but today he is spot on.

What I say to the moaners is if the town is so bad and no future, move away. You’re living in the wrong age like Luddites and looking at the past through rose tinted glasses.

From what I have seen, Wigan Park is too green. Maybe they've overdone it with the Miracle Grow

Not much At Middlebrook apart from M&S and Asda it nearly all furniture and home furniture.
As for the Brick Stadium, record crowds the year for the Rugby, 20,000 plus for the Saints game! Don’t thing the Trotters had that this season and the park will be packed for The VE Day celebration on Saturday 20th.
You don’t know what you are missing Lass.

Of course, parts of the town is a building site. The town is in transition. The phrase you can’t make an omelette without cracking an egg, comes to mind.

I don’t think is Sad nor a Goodbye merely at transition.
That gap will be filled with the entrance to the Multimedia Centre.
I am looking forward to the Cinema complex but the climbing wall and bowling alley are not for me but will be popular I’m sure with families and younger folk.
Might need more parking in the town centre though!

Well said Veronica.

Veronica. If you came into town you will see that the majority of the people are from the older generation, myself included.

It’s a bit rich for “The King Ot The Grot Shot” Mick to be complaining. This is the guy who gave us the man peeing under the bridge, followed by the gas pipe across the canal. Not to mention the scrap metal trolleys dragged out of the canal.
Save me a seat Garry!

We’ve had transitions before not that long ago in the grand scheme of things and time. How many transitions does it take to get a town up and running. That one was supposed to be the one to end all transitions! Oval Ball I’m very pleased you are happy with Wigan I’m not so I go elsewhere there’s quite a bit more to buy up there for what I want and need. I do miss the Wigan of the past you are correct in that. Wigan is in my bones and DNA and from time to time I will come but not as much. I can also go and see a film anytime I want. Middlebrook serves a purpose that Wigan can’t at the moment sadly.

Maybe a lot of us look at the Wigan of the past through rose-coloured glasses because there was something to see back then. I don't want to move away, Billy. I love Wigan and that is why I care about what is happening to it. I was born here and will die here, and if I had ever had the chance to move away to one of these "million pound houses" in a posh place that people apparently win in competitions, I would refuse it or give it away. It just breaks my heart to see the town as it is now, Yes, it WOULD have looked lovely yesterday because the sun was cracking the flags and it brought people out.....everywhere looks lovely on a beautiful day. It was the same in Skipton, despite all the "gawpy-looking tourists". I can understand people saying the town is "in transition", but the eggs were broken a long time ago.....how long do we have to wait for the omelette? As Elizabeth said earlier, I will be very pleasantly surprised if we ever see what has been promised, and will gladly hold my hands up and say I was wrong, but whether right or wrong, every one of us on here is entitled to an opinion. We don't HAVE to agree with each other; we just see things differently.

Change the record.

I’m afraid Middlebrook is always busy and much more than furniture shops,and a regular bus service from Wigan doesn’t help Wigan at all but that’s a fact and albeit Dennis agrees.

Heaving with people - wow, so back to those crowds of the 1950s & '60s? oh, just a few more than in the photo then, and look none of them are carrying bags of shopping - and why, simply because there aren't any shops from which to buy shopping from, and that's why folks park up to have a walk around the town centre, then go back and do their shopping at Tesco. If any folks do suffer from boiling blood, then there's an enormous choice of coffee shops along Standishgate and Market Place, it's where one can and sit awhile whilst imbibing of their overpriced products, thus letting the blood cool, only for it to boil again when one comes to pay the bill.

I only go along there to feed the starving Pigeons. §:¬)

The biggest champion of Wigan as it is…..lives quite a few miles outside the town. Does he ever come to Wigan to shop? I doubt it. Would he ever come to live nearer? I doubt it.
Kath as I already said I am enjoying my adopted town more at the moment after 55 years there’s enough places to shop and I quite like going to Middlebrook I find it useful. Coming to town in Wigan was something I did for years and years because it was MY town and I loved it. As it is now it just does not appeal… sad but that’s how it is. You have to go where it’s convenient.

When we talk about Wigan it's about Shopping and what we've lost over time and not for the better. I find it very hard to like what's going on with our Town, there's nothing there anymore just junkfood outlets, barbers and other poor quality businesses. Driving up Wallgate from North West Station is a total shambles up to Weatherspoons, the Town in my opinion is degrading and for me will never return to the great times of the 1960s. Change is not always for the better and much is lost forever.

Calm down Dennis, Pad is not a photo competition, it's just to show what Wigan is like on a particular day.
Think of the future when China is ruling the world and we will all be living on packets of spacemens food. We will have no need for shopping trolleys or supermarkets so the photo of the trolleys will become historical.
I can see it now, comments on WW 3001 that this photo takes me back along long time ago to what my great great great grandmother used to tell her mother about how we used to shop for food by pushing these trolleys around in big buildings called supermarkets.

The down side to Wigan which cannot be changed is it very hilly and was a challenge to push a wheelchair round,.Now it is just old age I still like walking around Wigan. If people think Wigan is bad go to St Helens which is a bigger ghost town than Wigan and lets see who finishes their redevelopment first. Even St Helens council dropped a booboo they pulled a multi storey car park down then realised there was a shortage of car parking spaces

Well said Arthur sense and reasoning against the clownish claptrap!

Mick you are too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

Does he not even know what an evil regime China is to its own people?!!!

What a load of twaddle!

Mark my words, Dennis it's all going to happen.

So speaks Nostradamus Mick..the usual rubbish. He’s been reading his comics again.

I've been to China about 5 times, so I know a bit of what I'm talking about. You might laugh about us eating packets of the same food they feed the spacemen on, but it will come true; they have already started by telling young families to feed their kids on mashed-up packets of ready-to-eat dinners.

Never forget…..“Following seven weeks of protests by Chinese citizens in Beijing who opposed the authoritarian rule of their government, the Chinese Liberation Army rolled into Tiananmen Square with tanks and armed soldiers and began an assault on the protestors. The complete death toll is unknown..”
They still persecute their own people and rule with a ‘ rod of iron’….
And you think you know a bit about the Chinese. Why do you think the Hong Congers got out?

The Chinese folks will all be protesting and up in arms too, if all what's in their shops are packets of mashed up rice and crickets, or a selection of other insects for whatever takes your fancy.

Veronica, remember also during the Hong Kong protests against Beijing rule, when many protestors were beaten up or killed on the streets, and many of them were taken away too, and they'll never be seen again.

Exactly Cyril and then he says he knows everything to know about the Chinese because he’s been there 5 times as a ‘gawping tourist’ And that’s besides the ‘cheap Jack’ stuff from there. Not to mention the Climate Change they don’t even take notice of! But according to him China will rule the world!
He needs to stop reading comics…

Cyril the ones who were taken away will have been put in camps to be ‘re-educated’. They will end up like Robots.

It's because they are strict with their citizens that the trains and buses run on time.
At the time of the Tiananmen Square I had a business and imported container loads of Chinese made products, so I kept up with the news coming out of China, and what the government were scared of was for the army, who had been keeping an eye on the prostesters might start to feel sorry for them.
So the government sent for another regiment of soldiers who had been in barracks with no news or television, so they knew nothing about what had been going on, and this is why they went in hard.
I thought that was a very clever move on the government's behalf.
Once I was walking up the street, and 29 army trucks came by, each one had a prisoner tied to the wooden rails of the truck with a sign hanging around their neck telling people why they were being taken away for the crimes they commited, one of them was a young women with long black hair, next morning it was in the papers that they all got shot and the reason they took them on a last ride through there local villages, because this acts as a warning to other who might think of commiting a crime.

And you think they’ll rule the World? You must be mad….

Well if they decide tomorrow to stop selling us socks, shoes and knickers it won't be long until we are all running around bare footed and bare bummed.