As you head North into my home town of Wigan on the railway, you will pass under a bridge with the words ‘welcome to hell’ spray-painted across it. You may laugh. You may gulp. You may decide you’ll stay in platform 4’s café as you wait for your connection, rather than venturing out of the station, lest you fall deeper into the seething pit of this Northern inferno.
Your fears, I think, would be unfounded. If hell is filled with bakeries that sell meat and potato pie sandwiches as a local delicacy, then I’ll happily go on sinning. If people in hell are so friendly and helpful that they will cross the street to tell me my lace is undone, lest I trip and fall headfirst in front of the 601 bus to Leigh, then like Mark Twain, I’ll go there for the company.
The pies and the populace aside, there is one particular reason why Wigan is, in its own peculiar way, sort of heavenly: it is the least pretentious place on earth.
In this ex-mining town in the North West of England, a pie is filled with beef, spuds and gravy, not butternut squash, beetroot and quinoa. This is a place where the market’s make-up stall sells knock-off lip gloss, lip-tattoo wands, Miracle Pout Stain, Triple Thick Tint, and Diamond Plumping Collagen Effect Gel Sticks from a giant black bin labelled ‘lippie’. When I get off the train at Wigan North Western, I breathe a sigh of relief and my heart rate steadies, because I know that no-one here is going to ask me to ‘tease out that idea to a greater level of maturity,’ or tell me to develop a ‘suite of communication materials’, or say ‘you and I need to sit down outside of this room and have a conversation about that’. Wiganers will always simply say ‘let’s talk about it’.
Bullshit withers and dies here. Even industries that have spent decades completely awash with baloney, such as Hair and Beauty, have retained a little integrity in this place. Wigan hairdressers will not greet you with smiles so fixed that they may well have been caked in half a tin of Elnette. They will not drip feed you compliments. They will not give your hair ‘directional’ layers without asking. They will, however, take your bag and jacket and lob them in a cupboard, sit you down, give you a back-to-front polyester jacket to wear and say, ‘What we doing?’ while attacking your knots with a comb. Your hair is not your crowning glory, your statement to the world or a reflection of your true self, as dozens of slimy shampoo ads would have you believe. It is hair. The same stuff that covers the floor and clogs the drains. And they will treat is as such, so help them God.
Why does this matter? Because people are bored of being lied to. People are bored of spin, of calling printers ‘multi-functional devices’ and being forced to accept ‘tall’ as a synonym for ‘small’ in coffee shops. People are tired of language being used to manipulate and fool rather than to reveal. As a nation, we are drivel-fatigued.
In this atmosphere, straight-talking towns like Wigan accidentally, wonderfully, appear to hold the antidote.
Wigan should be marketed to the world as the spiritual home of plain English. Executives should come here on retreat when their waffle tolerance level has been exceeded and when their brains are frazzled from too much ‘greenfields thinking’ to restore themselves to sanity. I’m going to convert the old textile mill into a rehab centre to house them. The room service menu at this centre will be healingly straightforward – think cheese on toast, not Croque Monsieur; fish fingers, not locally-sourced cod strips encased in golden breadcrumbs. I imagine these execs gazing through their open windows across the canal, listening to passing parents chastise their kids is gloriously straightforward terms, and their spirits reviving at the sound of it, as if it were birdsong.
‘Welcome to Hell’ should be scrubbed off that railway bridge and replaced with the phrase ‘it is what it is’. This phrase is not a resignation to crapness. It is a philosophical standpoint. It embodies the town’s honesty, it’s refusal to tart things up, to fool itself, or you. Wigan is all knickers and no fur coat. It is a town without lippie.
