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Wigan Pier is the name given today to the area around the canal at the bottom of the Wigan flight of locks on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.〔(Wigan Pier - Leeds and Liverpool Canal )〕 It is a popular location for visitors and the local community in Wigan, Greater Manchester, England, situated just a few hundred yards south-west of the town centre. The name "Wigan Pier" has humorous or ironic connotations since it conjures an image of a seaside pleasure pier, whereas Wigan is in fact an inland and traditionally industrial town. ==History== The original "pier" at Wigan was a coal loading staithe, probably a wooden jetty, where wagons from a nearby colliery were unloaded into waiting barges on the canal. The original wooden pier is believed to have been demolished in 1929, with the iron from the tippler (a mechanism for tipping coal into the barges) being sold as scrap.〔 The origin of what really was 'Wigan Pier' goes that in 1891, an excursion train to Southport got delayed on the outskirts of Wigan not long after leaving Wallgate Station. At that time a long wooden gantry or trestle carried a mineral line from Lamb and Moore's Newtown Colliery on Scot Lane, to their Meadows Colliery in Frog Lane (where the Council refuse centre is now). This gantry was quite a structure as it had to span the Douglas valley crossing the river, the canal and the main rail line to Southport. As the delayed train waited for the signals to change one of the travellers remarked "where the b... hell are we?" and the reply became the basis for the immortal joke about the Wigan's Pier. George Formby, Sr. perpetuated the joke around the turn of the century in the music halls in Wigan adding that when he passed the Pier he noticed the tide was in (referring to the constant flooding in the low-lying area). George died in December 1920 and, with the demise of the collieries in the area, the gantry had long passed out of existence. Therefore when people looked for the Pier, the tippler for coal wagons at the canal terminus became the chosen object of the joke〔(Origin of the term )〕 The tippler became the favoured location when people subsequently wanted to see it. There are references to it in songs such as George Formby Junior's ''On the Wigan Boat Express''.〔(On the Wigan Boat Express )〕 In 1937, Wigan was featured in the title of George Orwell's ''The Road to Wigan Pier'', which dealt, in large part, with the living conditions of England's working poor. In response to a critic, Orwell insisted "He () liked Wigan very much — the people, not the scenery. Indeed, he has only one fault to find with it, and that is in respect of the celebrated Wigan Pier, which he had set his heart on seeing. Alas! Wigan Pier had been demolished, and even the spot where it used to stand is no longer certain." Some have embraced the Orwellian link, as it has provided the area with a modest tourist base over the years. "It seems funny to celebrate Orwell for highlighting all our bad points, but Wigan wouldn't be anywhere near as famous without him," said the Wigan Pier Experience's manager, Carole Tyldesley. "In the end George Orwell has proved to be a strong marketing tool."〔(On the road again )〕 Others regard this connection as disappointing, considering it an insinuation that Wigan is no better now than it was at the time of Orwell's writing. To see the difference, it is worth recalling a description of the canal scene from ''The Road to Wigan Pier'': "I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the ‘flashes’ — pools of stagnant water that had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly cold. The ‘flashes’ were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water." Today, the slag heaps have been removed or landscaped with trees, the factories are closed or converted to housing and the canal is only used for recreational boating and fishing. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Wigan Pier」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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