Wigan Album

i understand that some think we are on the road to death through global warming, but if they had experienced life in the fifties they may be a bit more relaxed about today's world

That made me smile freddie, you are right though when you think of all the pollution that was then quite legally pumped and dumped into the river, when I cast my mind back I can still smell the putrid aroma that would come bubbling up as it made its stinking and frothing way through town and onto and into the Irish Sea, where we on days out would swim and paddle, and thanks to the bleaching and dyeing works the river ran different colours on most days, though all that what we witnessed then is now happening, but on a much bigger scale in India and China. They haven't learned anything from the mistakes that we made during our industrial ages.

Not forgetting the bane of plastics on ours and marine life, in the 1950's and '60s we thought it to be a great blessing, but it's turned out to have had a big sting in its tail.

It was always a joy to go to Rivington and see where the river was sourced, and to see its natural pure water, we were told too that the River Douglas was once a prized river, where folks from far and wide would come to fish for Salmon, we as kids would laugh at that, but true it was once a famed Lancashire Salmon fishing river, until the industrialists got here.

"we were told too that the River Douglas was once a prized river, where folks from far and wide would come to fish for Salmon, we as kids would laugh at that"

Cyril, many are still laughing.

Aye, Bruce, but they are also marvelling as to how clean it now is, along with its thriving river life, and will be polishing the dust off their fishing rods to be ready to sit on its banks to angle for Atlantic Salmon once again. Have a read of this:
https://ribbletrust.org.uk/how-we-work/projects/our-douglas-project/#:~:text=The%20fish%20passes%20will%20reconnect,as%20Horwich%20in%20the%20future.

If someone had said back then in the 1950s and 1960s that in 30 to 40 years time the River Douglas would be running clean, with oxygenating plants growing and fish swimming freely along its course, we'd have thought them mad, but in the 1980s you actually began to see the bottom of the river, with oxygenating plants beginning to grow and fish being seen by the 1990s.

My husband was borough engineer at Wigan when the new sewage pipeline was installed along the Douglas Valley to Hoscar works near Parbold, we now have fish , kingfishers and thriving swans etc . The towpath and water are great places to spend your leisure time now.

‘The good old days’ of unfettered pollution. Literally no-one gave a stuff about what was happening to the natural world back then, yet many on here want us to go back to that. Appalling.

Interesting picture, I wonder where about it was taken.
To think as kids we used to swim in that and would come home a different colour depending what dye had been discharged. Amazing we survived.
Now most of the river banks are surrounded by trees and greenery and only shopping trolleys to contend with.