Mark Steel’s In Town

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The mint balls are defiantly Wigan, and I imagine the old couple from the market would be astonished if they met someone who’d never heard of them, as if they’d said they’d never heard of a banana.

No doubt the place is just as proud of its mint balls as it was of the Wigan man declared to be the fattest person in Britain. Eventually he couldn’t get out of his specially made seat, and relied on his wife, who, once it was confirmed he held the record, boasted about it to all her neighbours – ‘He’s the fattest in Britain now, you know’ – and showed them all the newspaper clippings that confirmed this triumph. It turned out she’d only met him after reading about his size in the local paper, and decided to make him her own. When he died the windows had to be removed so he could be hoisted through them, as there was no way he was getting through the door. A neighbour I spoke to, who’d never met him, was asked by his wife to go the funeral. When she said she was sorry, but she really couldn’t make it, the wife said with astonishment, ‘But he was the fattest man in Britain.’

Even the irresistible force of the Premier League has stumbled in its attempt to overwhelm Wigan as it does most places. Despite the local side having been in the top division for the past six seasons, the crowds are smaller than for the rugby league team.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the historical local hero, commemorated with a statue in the centre of town and his picture on all the official leaflets for local events, is George Formby. If Wigan’s most famous figure was a prominent physicist or an influential Pre-Raphaelite painter it would be a terrible let-down, like finding out that your great-grandfather was a pimp.

George Formby was a buck-toothed banjolele player who sang slightly saucy songs with lyrics such as ‘If you could see what I can see, when I’m cleaning windows’. It’s unlikely that any of his songs will ever be covered by 50 Cent, but he was a super-star who people from a place like Wigan could identify with, who they could imagine bumping into at the pub. This image went beyond Wigan, as he became hugely popular in Soviet Russia, and it was even rumoured that Stalin had awarded him the Order of Lenin. This would presumably have irritated the odd Soviet commander, who might have lived through the siege of Leningrad for two years living off earthworms and fighting the Nazis using whittled toenail clippings as weapons, only to lag in the queue for a medal behind a banjolele player from Wigan. The story of the medal was an exaggeration, but there was something about Formby that was the embodiment of Wigan, not just working-class but unashamedly so. Otherwise how could he have sung a song called ‘The Wigan Express’ that went ‘She got some shocks in her signal box’?

In 1946, when he toured pre-apartheid South Africa, he upset his hosts by refusing to play segregated venues. As a result a black member of one audience presented Formby’s wife Beryl with a box of chocolates, and George gave the man a hug. National Party leader Daniel François Malan, who would introduce apartheid two years later, heard about this and phoned Beryl to complain, to which she replied, ‘Why don’t you piss off, you horrible little man?’

At first the idea of George Formby and his wife as radical anti-apartheid activists seems as surreal as finding out that Bobby Davro spent five years as a guerrilla fighting with Che Guevara, but in a way it symbolises Wigan’s history as an apparently jolly working-class town getting by without complaining, but with a calm commitment to rebellion underneath. In 1779 cotton workers in Wigan staged one of Britain’s first riots against unemployment. It lasted for several days, until the militia was brought in from Liverpool. The area was at the centre of the Lancashire Luddite riots, and in 1842 a strike of spinners ended up in a battle with two companies of riflemen.

The first miners’ strike of the twentieth century was in Wigan, in 1921 Wigan miners rioted until dispersed by the 16th Hussars, and the local pits were influential in every national strike. It feels as if a Wigan historian might say, ‘Ee, I’ll not call it proper decade if we’ve not been fired on by yeomen or suchlike.’

All this may make Wigan an unlikely setting for a vegan pagan café run by warlocks and called the Coven, but it was right opposite the main station. The warlocks greeted you with the most unsettling behaviour warlocks could manage, by being disconcertingly normal. ‘Hello love, right windy today, isn’t it? How about a piping-hot mug of elderflower-and-nettle tea to warm them bones up?’ one of them said.

The place was cluttered with sticks of incense, dream catchers and models of black cats, and there was a cheery sign informing you they’d cast a spell for you if you liked, in that chirpy lettering that looks as if it’s been written by a neat ten-year-old to be put on the classroom wall. But somehow warlocks seem palatable when they’re working-class and from Wigan. They were warm and neighbourly warlocks, always likely to nip in to see old Elsie on the way home, as she’s getting on and can be a bit forgetful, and one night when she’d forgotten to get any food for her cat, the friendly warlock turned it into stone until the morning so it wouldn’t get hungry.

Sometimes they were disappointingly normal, just bringing you a coffee when you were hoping they’d break into a naked fertility dance. But one Saturday afternoon in the Coven, with my daughter and her friend, we were waiting for our drinks by the upstairs window while flicking through a folder of common hexes. Suddenly the girls said, ‘Wow, look at that!’ A group of men had rushed out onto the street from the Wetherspoon’s pub next door. One of them was on crutches, and he made four agile bounds before deftly swinging them onto the back of someone he must have had a disagreement with on some issue. The street quickly became a battlefield. ‘Someone should do something,’ said the owner of the café. Presumably he’d run out of the potion that deals with a mass crutch-wielding brawl, or at least shrinks the fighters to the size of mice, so they don’t hold up the traffic.

It was almost as if the fighters were making a statement, that you can sit somewhere fancy and pagan if you like, but you can’t escape the real Wigan.

The place where the real Wigan meets the world of chain-company uniformity head on, where the greatest imagination has been displayed in the quest to eliminate imagination, is King Street, which is made up entirely of nightclubs. This isn’t a seedy quarter with bands playing under railway arches, and shirtless DJs scratching from what was once an office in a converted tinned-pudding warehouse. There are twelve clubs in a row, including Walkabout, Revolution, and a fake Irish place. The road is blocked to traffic, and outside each entrance a pair of bald men in black suits act as sentries, so you feel a sense of relief and smug achievement if you get in at all. At the first one we were told sternly by the bald men that it was open until 6 a.m. This information was conveyed with the sort of chilling menace with which I expect guards at Abu Ghraib said ‘You’ll be in here until 6 a.m.’ to prisoners as they were being shown into a room full of rusty implements.

Then we were looked up and down and searched, and it felt as if we might be taken into a small, bare room to be interviewed by an official while a man in a white shirt stood silently behind us holding an unsettled Alsatian on a short lead.

Eventually they let us pay £2 each and rubbed a blurry inkstain onto the backs of our hands. Triumphant, we marched through the huge wooden doors of a glorious Victorian building, that could have been an embassy if Wigan was ever a country, into the split-level dance floor, past a flashing semi-circular bar and a machine pumping out dry ice. Having looked round thoroughly, it was clear that we were the only people there. After a couple of club mix versions of songs I thought I recognised but probably didn’t, four more people came in, but it turned out they were security.

It was tempting to stay until 6 a.m., but instead we went to a nineties club, where about twenty people danced to ‘Wiggle Wiggle’ and Bobby Brown, including someone dressed in a blue all-body gimp outfit with one hole to breathe through. But the most disturbing thing about the place was the overwhelming stench of cleaning products. Was this a new trend, clubs that are renowned for their excessive cleanliness, with a promise that every surface will be polished with Pledge every seven minutes? At the bar it seemed natural to ask for a pint of Jif with a Toilet Duck chaser, and the carpet oozed the aroma of an office to let that’s been abused with too much Shake ’n’ Vac, which was a mistake, as that was definitely a symbol of the eighties, not the nineties.

The best-known chains seemed to be the most popular. Walkabout was the sweatiest, and unlike our first venue you couldn’t practise chipping golf balls across the room without any fear of irritating someone. But as we strolled up the street past the bare thighs and gelled hair, across the pavement that was ready to receive the night’s vomit, I was sort of jealous. How I would have loved, when I was twenty, to have had a street where you were not only allowed but virtually ordered to drink until any time you liked, with hundreds of women in attendance enabling you to dream that at any moment this week you might have a brief conversation with one of them.

But there’s something lacking in a street that regiments adolescent disorderliness. It’s like a board put up by the council for people to graffiti on. The whole point of drinking and dancing late is to feel slightly seedy, to be aware that you’re gyrating or slumped against a fruit machine while respectable society is fast asleep. Once it’s sanctioned, contained, sanitised and run by chains that have a brand image to convey, it’s lost its edge. It’s predictable, as the Arctic Monkeys say. After all that anticipation, ‘All that happened is you drank a lot.’

Worse than encouraging binge drinking, this is a top-down, orchestrated encouragement of corporate binge drinking, the vodkas and tequila slammers arranged according to the demands of a study group that discussed its findings using a PowerPoint display in a room overlooking the Thames in Reading.

Maybe this is more poignant in the home of northern soul, the scene driven from the bottom up that led thousands to hitch and cajole lifts across the country every week in the 1970s to venues such as the Wigan Casino. There’s no generally accepted theory as to why this started, why a lobby-eating, overwhelmingly white corner of north-west England became the centre of a music scene that originated in the black districts of Detroit. But northern soul became a whole category of music, as much as ska or speed garage, revolving around Wigan and fuelled by the thousands who went there, rather than by the desires of leisure-centre-industry shareholders, and who took drugs and danced and then hitched home to Essex or Devon. The trend faded away in the eighties, but there are still posters in the King Street nightclubs for monthly northern soul sessions that take place, for some reason, in the afternoon, as if it’s a modern version of a tea dance, in which a lady comes round with a trolley and asks, ‘Would you like an upper with your tea, Mrs Bottomley?’ and is told, ‘Oo no, dear, I had two doses of speed yesterday, any more will give me terrible indigestion.’

So one of Wigan’s most unlikely achievements is that the town that had already contributed to international music by propelling the banjolele across Soviet Russia became the heart of a global music scene, attracting soul legends such as Edwin Starr, who sat a few yards from the pies and lobby and the mint-ball factory, across the road from the indoor market, and if he popped in for a cup of tea he probably risked the disapproval of a middle-aged couple who’ll have looked him up and down and muttered, ‘Student from Bolton, I shouldn’t wonder.’

Horwich (#ulink_be062a9c-dab5-546b-97ed-e17ec2eb80e0)

The generalisation that all Londoners are grisly and unfriendly while northerners whistle all day and give away their houses to strangers is clearly a myth. But there are plenty who insist that this irrational idea is true. You could cite any example as evidence to the contrary, and they’d say something like, ‘Yes, but at least the Yorkshire Ripper would lend his neighbours a cup of marmalade, even on the morning of a murder.’

But some people will work tirelessly to fit the stereotype. To sight the snarling Londoner the best method is to ride through the capital on a pushbike. The first time you hear someone lean out of a window and screech, ‘Get out of my way, you fucking cunt!’ you might be slightly peeved. But then it becomes fascinating. Sometimes their rage is so overwhelming you’re captivated by the veins pumping out of their neck, and it seems they’re physically unable to reach the end of the word, so they yell, ‘Cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu’ until you’ve turned right and into the next street never knowing whether they got as far as ‘nt’, or if they had to go to the doctors, still growling ‘u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u’ like a stuck CD until they’re given an injection.

One morning, on the north side of Vauxhall Bridge, I pulled up at the lights next to a gargantuan lorry. One of the essential rules of cycling in London is, when you’re at traffic lights, to make eye contact with the motorist behind you, to be certain they’ve seen you, especially if they’re driving a gargantuan lorry. Nearly always the motorist smiles or waves or acknowledges you in some innocuous way, but this time the driver wound down the window and snarled as if gravel was swilling round his voicebox, with every consonant emphasised for maximum snappiness, ‘What’s your fucking problem?’

‘I’m just making sure you’ve seen me, mate,’ I said, being slightly dishonest with the word ‘mate’. And then he spread his frame and breathed in, as if preparing for a roar like Godzilla, and yelled, ‘I pay road tax. You pay fuck off.’ Just imagine the anguish rolling around in this driver’s head at that moment. Presumably he was thinking, ‘Here is the ideal opportunity for me to convey my thoughts on the iniquities of our road-funding system, whereby he is considered exempt from contributions in spite of using the roads as much as me, albeit on two wheels as opposed to my 184, and that, in my view, is inconsistent and must be redressed. But at the same time, I can’t wait to tell him to fuck off. Oh no, now I’ve combined the two, and it’s come out grammatically incoherent.’

On the other hand, to spot a swarm of neighbourly northerners chatting to each other on pavements you should try Horwich, a couple of hills from Wigan and four miles west of Bolton, at the foot of the South Pennines. It’s a town of about 23,000 that grew around a railway works, and since that shut down everyone seems to spend all day chatting. I became familiar with Horwich from 2007, when I first met my wife.

That meant I got to know the neighbours, which means everyone, and join them in midstreet chats. One day a woman called Betty tried to stop me for a chat while I was going for a run. ‘Oh, hello love. How you getting on? Only, I’ve been meaning to ask you –’ she said, as she leaned on her shopping trolley while I jogged by in my shorts.

As I called out, ‘I’m going for a run at the moment, Betty,’ I felt as if I’d committed a dreadful crime, as the etiquette here is always to stop and chat, even if you’re fleeing for your life from a maniac with an axe. Even then you’d probably be all right, because the maniac would have to stop and chat as well, until after forty minutes he’d be told, ‘Anyway, love, I can see you’re busy so I shan’t keep you,’ and all being well you’d both set off again at the same time to keep the chase fair.

In another forlorn attempt to be physically active I went for a swim at the leisure centre, and in an inept moment I veered to one side and brought my foot down and across those plastic baubles used to divide the pool into lanes. It was enough to cause a stifled yelp and make me turn round to see what damage I’d done. I could see the foot was cut, and little streams of blood were starting to create mesmerising shapes. At that point a woman swimming towards me in the next lane stopped and said, ‘Oo, hello, oh, you don’t know me, love, but I’ve seen you on TV on, oo, what was that programme, anyway I said to my husband I’ve seen you round Horwich, I said to him, “I’m sure that’s Mark Steel I saw popping into the grocers on Winter Hey Lane.”’