Wigan. It is not the most inspiring place is it? Images of cloth caps, cobbles, clogs and cotton mills spring to mind. The other major thing about Wigan is that although it is miles away from the coast it has its pier featured in the title of the George Orwell classic "The Road To Wigan Pier" and also in a number of old music hall jokes. It also inspired the building of the first heritage centre in Britain, in the early 1980s, the Wigan Pier Experience.

The Wigan Pier Experience, as mentioned, was the first heritage centre in the country. It was built as a community initiative to bring tourism to an economically depressed community using the reputation of the pier as a starting point. The pier, which was a coal-loading device by the canal side, had long since disappeared but was resurrected for the heritage centre. The heritage centre itself revolves around the town of Wigan at the end of the Victorian era in 1900.

How to get there?

The Attraction
The first and main part of the attraction we visited was the Way We Were exhibition. It starts off in Blackpool on a bank holiday weekend with all the thrills of an old fashioned day at the beach. It includes pictures of donkeys, saucy postcards and What The Butler Saw machines. This is evidently social history territory and those with mangle fatigue should not even enter! Back in Wigan there is the typical mocked up house with the outside toilet and the rag rugs and all the trappings of the "Good old days" you see in every open-air museum, heritage centre and museum. There is an interesting exhibition explaining the situation Wigan was in, in the late Victorian era. I thought that was useful as it put the whole attraction into context. It also has a street of different shops and market stalls all recreated and a schoolroom. Wigan Pier was also the first attraction to have a troupe of in-house professional actors and actresses to provide Living History characters. There are number of different sketches developed and rotated each day. We saw the courting couple performance in the market square. It was actually really good and brought the attraction to life. They also included the audience. To this day our tutor is known as Mrs Waggstaff after her cameo in the performance!

The schoolroom is also another piece of living history. It is brilliantly done and well researched
The setting is superb with slates and loads of maps with lots of pink on them The schoolroom has one of their actors taking the part of he strict teacher. It reminded me a lot of the reality TV program that used to be on That Will Teach Them. In our Visitor studies course we had a guest speaker from Wigan Pier who was an ex student on the course who did her dissertation on people's attitudes to Victorian schoolroom. Apparently children ran out because the teacher was so scary and they advise that young children do not go in there. The lesson is great with lining up sprightly, no talking and a lesson on the three c's of Lancashire (Cotton, coal and canals). Anyone wearing rings was called a Jezebel even the lads. Unfortunately the atmosphere was ruined for us and the school party that was in on the same session as us by another group of adults with leaning disabilities. I felt they did not quite understand the situation and ruined the atmosphere slightly as the actress did not do the full routine with them I fully understood this but in a way I wish I had been in another session to get the full effect of the school room. Luckily the second time was a lot better and my mother in laws picked out as a troublemaker!

The pier itself is actually not that impressive. It is just a small metal structure and it is not even the original one. I suppose this could be an anti climax if you were expecting something more spectacular.

Café