Local Life - Wigan - March 2018

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Orrell resident John, now 64, was one of those
tasked with beautifying the borough.
Originally Pemberton, John grew up on Ridyard
Street and later moved to Marsh Green. He attended
Scot Lane Primary before moving to Gidlow
Secondary Modern, which he left aged 15 without
any qualifications. After four years working at a Lord
& Sharman Ross Works shoemaker’s in Campbell
Street, Pemberton, he got a job with Wigan
Corporation’s Parks Department.
“The double digging was
relentless”
The initiation was a baptism of fire: “I was sent to
Haigh Hall to do ‘double digging’. It was relentless,
no wonder it was actually known as ‘b*****d
trenching’ but I liked being outdoors.
“I started with two guys who had been in prison and
one old seasoned navvy from the building trade. I
was only 19 at the time so it was all a bit intimidating.
“We were among the very first members of the
newly-formed landscape section of the council and
we were the pioneers who transformed that bleak
and often ridiculed
landscape into a
garden city, because
that’s how I saw it
after we became a
huge Metropolitan
Borough.
“In those days, the
parks teams had an
John in the ‘70s
incredible number of
employees; money was literally thrown at us.
“The spoil heaps looked like scenes from a distant
barren planet and could have been ideal settings for
sci-fi films.
“When you look at old pictures, the public parks
looked great, and they were. But they were patches
of brightness on a very grey landscape. It was our
job to ‘colour’ those patches in.”
One of the first projects he was involved with was
the regeneration of the Wallgate and Scholes areas:
“It was around 1975 when we started ‘greening up’
the borough. There were a lot of new communities
being built. Scholes was like a new garden city and
we’d move in once the building works had finished.
It was almost like we were following the builders
Spoil heaps, such as this one in Southern Street, Pemberton, were commonplace in 1970s Wigan