21-05-2025
Letter from Wigan
Photo by George Hutton
In early March, Darren Orme was reported missing from his home on the Beech Hill estate in Wigan. He was well known locally as a 'superfan' of Wigan Athletic football club, and his disappearance galvanised the local community in his support. As the days passed and he had not been found, flowers, scarves and football shirts were left in his honour outside the Brick Community Stadium, as if his loss was already being mourned. The stadium, renamed in May 2024 to reflect a partnership with a local anti-poverty charity, is the home ground of Wigan Athletic and Wigan Warriors, the all-conquering rugby league club coached by Matt Peet. Both clubs are owned by Mike Danson, the CEO of GlobalData and owner of the New Statesman, who was born and grew up in Wigan. Under his ownership, the two clubs, once rivals, are working in collaboration as the Wigan Sporting Group and will share an open-plan office at the Robin Park Arena, adjacent to the Brick stadium.
Darren's body was eventually found in a river near the stadium. His funeral was held on 24 April and many hundreds of local people were in attendance alongside players and officials from the football and rugby clubs. 'We'd never seen anything like it before,' Kris Radlinski, who played 332 games for Wigan Warriors from 1993 to 2006 and is now the CEO of the club, told me. 'There was silence, there was respect. The funeral procession did a lap of the stadium on the way to the church. At the end of the lap, the procession stopped, and the family got out to thank all the footballers and rugby players who were there. It was a powerful moment, the closest together the two clubs have felt in 30 years.'
Professor Chris Brookes (universally known as 'Doc'), chairman of Wigan Warriors, agreed the symbolism was striking. 'The two clubs now need to move forward in a connected way, so we are working actively to combine resources and efforts, maximising our contribution to the people of Wigan and our loyal fanbases.'
The sports group is an anchor institution in a town that has very few. Lisa Nandy, MP for Wigan since 2010, says 'sport is the glue holding the town together'. Danson, Radlinski and Peet are all from the town and understand that the Warriors are much more than a club: they represent a culture, a community, and create a sense of shared belonging.
When George Orwell came to Wigan and Barnsley in the 1930s to write about the effects of mass unemployment, he found an England he could respect – even believe in. Deep underground with the miners in the Wigan coalfields, this contrarian old Etonian encountered a way of life that profoundly affected his politics. Orwell did not sentimentalise the northern working class in The Road to Wigan Pier, but admired their fortitude, togetherness and patriotism. He believed in a socialism that was not 'book-trained' but was compatible with the common decency of the 'submerged working class', among whom he briefly lived in Wigan.
In a 1943 BBC broadcast, Orwell acknowledged that Wigan, though 'not worse than fifty other places', had 'always been picked on as a symbol of the ugliness of the industrial areas'. Lisa Nandy understands the sentiment. 'A whole industry has developed around understanding the rise of Nigel Farage's Reform,' she scornfully said. 'These people travel up from London almost like David Attenborough to observe these strange people in the wilds. They write absolute shite about us and then get back on their trains.'
I told her I was in Wigan not as some kind of anthropologist but because I'd been asked to visit by Tom Gatti and Gordon Brown to write about the connection between sport, politics and the common good for this special issue of the magazine.
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Nandy and I met on a bright morning at the Robin Park Arena where civil society groups were taking part in the Warriors' inaugural mental health awareness week. We spoke to a group of 12-year-old boys; they were among 40 children there, some of whom had been excluded from school. They were being encouraged to see how sport could offer discipline and definition to what one volunteer, a former police officer, called 'their often-chaotic lives'. 'I don't want to be in school,' one boy told me. 'I want to be here. I want to be active!'
Wigan has advantages, not least in elite sports; the diaspora of former Warriors players includes Andy Farrell, head coach of Ireland rugby union team and now also of the British and Irish Lions squad that will tour Australia, and Sean Edwards, who is the defence coach for the French rugby union national team. The town's largest employer is Heinz, but it provides largely low-skilled work in food processing and packaging. Like other former coalfield communities (many of them rugby league towns), Wigan suffers from intergenerational inequality and economic stagnation. 'Not long ago mining and industrial production offered back-breaking work, but work with purpose: it won wars and underpinned our security,' Josh Simons, the former head of Labour Together and a local MP, told me. 'Since then, the internet revolution has offered little to northern towns. Our public realm has been left in ruins and our public services trashed.'
Wigan has the highest male suicide rate in the country and some of the highest rates of domestic violence. It has the highest school suspension rate in England and as many as 23,000 children live in poverty (the theme of this guest-edited issue). Between 2010 and 2017 the local council had its budget cut by 43 per cent, the third worst affected local authority in England. There is inadequate infrastructure for new housing and lower than average life expectancy. Loneliness is a scourge, particularly among young men.
The area has had several local 'asylum hotels', invariably located in poorer areas in England, which have been another source of tension, alongside rising house prices and rent costs. 'Rents have got higher and higher and so more and more houses have been turned into HMOs [houses of multiple occupancy] because that's the only thing that people can afford,' Nandy said.
'But on top of that, we've also had Serco buying up asylum accommodation, very concentrated in particular postcodes, even particular streets, because they go for the places that are cheapest. And obviously that's caused serious problems because you've then got several families in accommodation that's only meant for one. You've got problems with bin collections, with a very transient community in what used to be a very settled community. And so it's a double whammy because not only is the community changed beyond recognition, without people having any control over it, but it's also that the prices that your kids are now paying [for housing] have become ever higher.' (Serco say they do not buy property but lease from private landlords.)
In a previous conversation, Nandy mentioned to me that the north of England was so tense it could 'go up in flames'. What did she mean exactly? 'Last summer, when we had the horrendous murder of those young girls [in Southport], there was already a real sense of tension in the north. People have watched their town centres falling apart, their life has got harder over the last decade and a half… I don't remember a time when people worked this hard and had so little to show for it.'
She referenced again the 'huge pressures on housing'. And then said: 'All of that has fuelled a real sense of anger about what people are being asked to put up with. And it all really came to a head around Southport, because, you know, your children being safe, your community being a decent place to live. It was one of those absolute flashpoint moments… a moment of release. I don't mean the violent organised thuggery. People rejected that very strongly here, but people want to speak out, to be heard.'
The notion of something going up in flames suggests that one spark could ignite a conflagration. 'That's what happened last summer.' Could it happen again? 'It could do. I mean, we are not complacent about it all.'
I've been visiting the post-industrial north-west for more than three decades and wrote about the decline of the racially and religiously segregated towns of Rochdale and Oldham in my book about the condition of England, Who Are We Now? (2021), which Nandy told me she had read. In a speech in Manchester in July 2019, shortly after he became prime minister, Boris Johnson lamented the decline of the old mining and mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire. 'The story has been, for young people growing up there, one of hopelessness, or the hope that one day they'll get out and never come back.'
Johnson promised to 'level up' the north but the Conservative wish to reduce regional inequalities amounted to little more than rhetoric. Who now speaks seriously of levelling up? 'It was totally discredited,' Nandy said. 'It became very much a group of civil servants being tasked to wander around the north of England, pointing at things and saying 'let's put a bit of money behind that' rather than empowering communities to be able to make that contribution themselves. What we got here in Wigan was a small refund on the money that had been taken from us, but dictated by a group of civil servants in Whitehall as to how we could spend it.'
Politics is about place – where people live, go to school, work, interact, play sports, socialise, worship – but what happens when a place loses its purpose? Visiting the former mill towns of the north-west for the first time, I noticed the grandeur of the civic architecture – the High Victorian town halls and arcades, the great churches, the former libraries and exchanges, the miners' and technical colleges – but was dismayed to observe how many of these buildings had been neglected or were derelict, a standing rebuke to generations of politicians who had failed the north.
Wigan has not lost its purpose, but it is burdened with social, economic and spatial inequalities, reduced social mobility and diminished aspiration. Mike Danson explained how Wigan is attempting to address these issues. 'In her book Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin described how Abraham Lincoln got various parties to work together during the Civil War for the greater good,' he said. 'In today's communities we are facing huge economic and social problems, but the challenge is to solve them. In Wigan we have a team of 'community anchors'. David Molyneux and Alison McKenzie-Folan at Wigan council are exceptional, similarly our MPs offer a special set of skills. On the sports side, the rugby and the football clubs work together. The combination, with charity and business, shows a unique way of working – our own team of rivals. They are all locals, and they want to create change and a thriving town for the next generation.'
One plan is to invest in Al and tech hubs. Wigan has local expertise in sport, sports data and food processing. Josh Simons said: 'We're working to ensure the AI and data revolution actually benefits local people – so food and process manufacturing businesses in Wigan have the latest in AI-powered technology and skills.'
On Saturday 17 May, I visited Edge Hall Road in Orrell, three miles to the west of Wigan town centre, for the official opening of a new high-performance centre for women and girls. Edge Hall Road was originally built as the permanent ground of Orrell rugby union club, but in recent years, under the previous ownership of Wigan Warriors, the site had become derelict. Transformed by £350,000 of investment, it is now the new home of Wigan Athletic and Wigan Warriors women's teams and when I visited girls were out on the pitch in small groups playing football and rugby. Simons was there and we chatted again about the social and economic challenges affecting the local community. Like all Red Wall Labour MPs, he is keenly alert to the threat posed by the Reform insurgency.
Orrell has 11,000 residents but very limited healthcare. Simons has been working with the Wigan sports group, in partnership with the NHS, to create a new health hub at Edge Hall Road that 'will benefit the whole community'.
The key word here is community. A nation is more than an 'imagined community' because our lives are embedded in relationships, institutions and networks. Lisa Nandy used an Orwellian phrase when she spoke to me of the 'country that lies beneath the surface', by which she meant the experience of those who feel submerged, or frustrated, or ignored. Simons said the people he represented were 'angry and they are right to be'.
For most people politics is not national, it is experienced locally, through a run-down, boarded-up high street, a bankrupt or impecunious council, an unreliable bus service, uncollected rubbish, a dysfunctional postal service, a school playing field sold to property developers, a GP practice where you cannot get an appointment, a hospital in special measures. If communities beyond the great cities are deprived of investment and opportunity, if economic security and social capital are missing, if the intermediate institutions and places where we gather and interact are absent or become derelict, as the Edge Hall Road site was, people's collective aspiration becomes thwarted. More than a sports club, the regenerated Edge Hall Road is a social asset, 'anchoring' a community, creating a sense of common purpose and belonging. Wigan and the post-industrial north need more of them.
[See also: Why George Osborne still runs Britain]
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