Wigan Pier Museum Highlights

Wigan Pier museum remembered in new film 10 years after closing

Read more at: https://www.wigantoday.net/news/wigan-pier-museum-remembered-in-new-film-10-years-after-closing-1-8908129

The various parts of the site have met differing fates since the tourists departed, with the working engine being kept in good order and still cranked into life every other Sunday.


Not sure if the engine runs every Sunday.


Always irritates me when fellow Wiganers bemoan the demise of The Way we were, yet when asked if they actually visited the place......

Really enjoyed that,when we went into one of the rooms of the house,there was a coffin in the parlour with the figure of the deceased in it,and we all had to speak in whispers..the classroom was another story altogether.

When we went I saw the coffin in the parlour and a woman was telling us about the dad she'd lost. The pub and the schoolroom looked pretty good.

Him,we went three times and each time there was a queue a mile long to get into the classroom.it was brilliant.

Same as me Maureen. I went when we first came home to uk so that would have been 1986/88, then took MIL/FIL for a visit. Then when we moved here I took a party of School children. Oh in fact 4 times I forgot about taking some children from St Johns school in Pemberton as well. I fealt like I knew everything there was to know for those inquizzative little minds. I cant understand why the council closed it, it was so popular

Me too Mrs A, nobody has ever been able to tell me why it was closed.

it was losing money?

Such a shame Vixen. Did people just lose interest?

I really cant see how it was losing money, I have been a few times, and every time I have been there were visitors from all over the country, single families, and Coach parties. It was well known not just in the North. Such a shame it closed.

You have to ask yourself the question ..... "am I interested in the way people in, - let's say, Bolton, or Wrexham, or Rochdale, or Telford even, - were"?

"No"?

Me neither!

So, that said, why should anybody be interested in how the people in Wigan 'were'?

Because the people in Wigan 'were' just the same as the people, more or less, everywhere 'were'. And it's only 'small - minded' Wiganers who believe that they 'were' any different to anybody anywhere else!

" And it's only 'small - minded' Wiganers who believe that they 'were' any different to anybody anywhere else!"

And of course 'Wigan' is a VERY small closely defined area is it not?

Sorry Mrs A should have put an ? on my post

It's history Tonks ...just history.

What range of years were depicted there? I figure around 1900.

One of the scenarios was set in 1908, the Maypole colliery disaster. The coffin in the parlour, the lady acting as a widow of a miner killed at Maypole.


If memory serves, the schoolroom (with actors playing master/mistress) was set in Victorian times.

Then there was the preserved bar from The Park Hotel, complete with waxwork of the Landlady Mrs Brown. That would have been rather contemporary, despite being an old-style pub.

22 years ago today 21st March 1986  her maj opened  The Way We Were.

Mac wrote:

An interesting piece of film Mac, thanks

I would like the garden to be left alone so nature and wildlife can take over to be honest. I suspect it won't though.