Ashton-in-Makerfield

Give your views ahead of £6.6m regeneration for Ashton-in-Makerfield

Ashton

For an overview of the proposals, watch a short video from those in-the-know about this exciting development
video

Peter the centre of Ashton consists of three roads basically making a triangle in the middle of this triangle is what was the market which now is a car park. Under this new plan it is intended to build shops/work units over half of the car park and plant trees dotted about over the other half.Also parking is used for the local doctors surgeries/clinic which does not have any parking facilities except a few disabled spaces. If you go down to the car park now after 9-00am you will be lucky to find a car parking space. I have asked how many spaces will be lost to this new scheme and where do the cars park afterwards NO REPLY TO THIS QUESTION The town centre is gridlocked at the best of times has a lot of the traffic is HGV's coming along the A58 and not all from the industrial estate at the Three Sisters. There are plans to extend behind the three Sisters and build another industrial estate adding to the traffic going through Ashton. So the main issues are Where are the new car parks going to be once these proposed units go onto the market and how to reduce the amount of traffic flow through the town The market car park is free parking and unlimited parking the other places to park are pay and display or limited parking times including the supermarkets

Wonder if they’ll start opening the toilets again when they’ve spent their 6.5 mill?

They could buy some of these.

Nutha White Elephant waste of money.

i,m sure some on here wont let you down peter israel & they,ll certainly find something to moan about .

Pot, kettle, black

rubbish .

Questions for the learned locals - Is 6.6 million pounds enough to do anything these days ? After you take out money for consultancy, engineers, architects, PR - Or will it be spent on lots of little things like flower baskets, painting and trees and what is the point of a cycle lane in the center of Ashton ? Is fixing pavements not something that should be done with council money ? There is no longer a public toilet in the market ? The best thing you can do in my view is figure out a way to reroute the HGVs so they don't come through the center. Maybe only allow them between 8pm-8am like the do in many cities.

Peter If a survey was done for traffic flow I estimate 95% of ALL traffic going through Ashton is just that . 5% are using the town for shopping/deliveries. Even the vast majority of traffic from the 3 sisters industrial estate including the buses from the depot do not come through Ashton. I don't know whether It would be feasible to make the town centre one way. A bigger junction at the top of Gerard Street use some of the money to buy the empty shop at the junction. Why waste money on paintings and murals .Years ago the council narrowed Gerard Street and made the footpath wider if no one is walking round Ashton what was the point all has they did was create a pinch point on the bend where HGV's miss each other by inches

Whups

You cannot keep saying the Tories are making a mess at a national level and ignore that Labour are doing likewise at our local level in Wigan.

Both as bad as each other in my book!

Yes you can OC most of the problems at local level are down to years of underfunding by this inept uncaring lying Tory government , i,'ll ask you the same question that gaffer keeps ignoring name one thing that's improved in the last 13 years of Tory mismanagement mismanagement

Handsomeminer

"Labour Council is flushing taxpayers' money down the toilet"

An Expensive Poo

LINK

£636.00 for each bog, when they could pick one up from B&Q for £20 quid.

yes we can todger just ask sub postmasters . like everything tory you have to beg for any help & feels like a hand out . get real todger .

a load of rubbish from 1stroke as per usual . nothin said about tory hanger ons who get £200 million at the drop of a hat .

So nothing to say about Ashton.
As usual,thread hijacked for political points .
Any money spent will of course will be welcomed,but I am sure residents would rather basic amenities be restored rather than
a paint job and street art

tell me where iv,e discredited ashton pal .and if anyone,s done any "hijacking" it,s you & at least i live here , you dont .

Perhaps a return to a smaller Wigan Borough away from Leigh might lead to the kind of things that local residents like in Ashton want in return for their Council Tax.

All gone downhill since 1974 when a Metropolitan Borough stretching from Chorley in the North to Warrington in the south and Bolton in the east to West Lancashire in the west was created which has resulted today, in a Wigan Council like in the NHS not coping with the increased population to provide the essentials of everyday living like Doctors, Dentists, Schools, Roads etc, etc.

No you don’t,you live in dg,
And yes,I do live in Ashton.
You want to improve your reading,because no where have I said that you have discredited Ashton as you put it ‘Pal’.
So still nothing to say about the topic?

Double post

dg is north ashton & until boundry changes was in wigan . & it says on yopur profile that you live in Crimpton on Sea which is in essex . is this fictional as you are ? .

It’s as fictional as you saying you live in Wigan!
I have removed the fictional town of Crimpton from my profile as to avoid any confusion ,and so that members don’t think it’s a real place in Essex

Whupsy

"a load of rubbish from 1stroke as per usual"

Doo yoo not think it is about time that yoo groo up

i will when you do .

Crimpton on Sea was the fictional town created for the TV programme Hi Di Hi.

yes gaffer i know & hinted to that fact in my reply .

Sorry that I ask this question so late in discussion on this thread, but, what sort of units are they going to place on Ashton's market square?

Ena click on the ASHTON link at the start of the thread then scroll down to Levelling up Ashton town centre

on the wigan council Facebook comments when it comes to Ashton 90% of people want the traffic fixing in the town center.....

Peter unless they can find a way of diverting traffic away from Ashton then no matter how much money is spent on the town then this problem will not go away.They cannot divert traffic at Stubshaw Cross because there is only two roads to the A580 via Golborne one has a low bridge and the other has a weight limit ,Plus badly increasing the traffic through Golborne They could go through the fields and connect Stubshaw to the M6 slip road at Landgate going over the main railway line . This would cost millions and take years to complete A few weeks ago the gas company were working on Bolton road (A58) for a week the traffic was queueing for miles in every direction. This week due to a major fire the road has got traffic lights again (electric) power cut plus no internet and queues again. When I drove past at 9-30pm last night at least they were working on the problem

what about putting a ramp on Liverpool road JCT 24... going the other direction for a start.... i always thought they would build a road from the m6 at landgate to the 3 sisters and if i remember right there is a old bridge over the train lines... but it must be 40 years ago since i was around there with a Ferret rabbiting

The 1949 roads plan of Lancashire County Council included a continuation of the M58 to Westhoughton and associated link roads from Wigan.
When the same authority reclaimed the land around the 3 sisters and designed the South Lancs industrial estate they incorporated a road from the estate to the M6 link road at Landgate. Unfortunately the 1974 local government reorganisation meant that responsibility for roads in our area moved to Manchester before the industrial estate was finished. Transferred from an authority with generations of expertise in bridge and road building to one with very little experience.


Roads

In the 1960s I remember looking at the road building equipment which could be seen at Levertons at Landgate, Earthmovers, massive Bulldozers etc, but they had all gone by the 1970s, and that included the road building

They were 'Caterpillar' agents, weren't they: the world's largest manufacturer of construction equipment.

Yes, I remember the Caterpillar logo, and at night the equipment showroom was lit up by spotlights, which made them look even better.

In the 1960s I remember going on holiday down south, on the M6 and although the M6 was open there was still a lot of construction work being done on the motorway junctions, new slip roads being built etc and that is where I saw Earthmoving equipment being used, which was brilliant, but my brother persuaded me that the "Plant Crossing" sign on a red background, was for actual plants who wished to cross the motorway using their roots as feet

The district's opencast mining was an excellent opportunity to get close up to earthmoving kit.

Did you ever get to see any of the giant draglines that once operated thereabouts?

I had a beautiful writing desk which was given to me by the manager at Levertons - even had one of their Land Rovers deliver it to my home. (A Mr Barton, never did find out his first name.)

The heavy goods could be diverted to the Eastlancs road and branch off at a suitable place but somebody else will have to think where so get your maps out girls and boys, as long as it misses Ashton then that's OK,

Ena

"see any of the giant draglines that once operated thereabouts?"

No, never see one of those.

They were quite impressive.

The largest (in USA) had a bucket that could accommodate "two Greyhound buses side by side!"

The two or three builders of them, stateside, eventually were taken over by Caterpillar.

A lot of the local opencast kit was built by Ruston Bucyrus. Bucyrus (Erie) was the American manufacturer, and Ruston, the Lincolnshire excavator manufacturer built a lot of UK stuff.

Photos and books of the period have become collectors items.

I remember when the old Pemberton Collieries site (Blundells) was open casted in the 1980s, but I don't think they used those type of machines, but I could never see what they used instead.

In the 1950's, my dad was a haulage contractor and coal merchant. I was a kid, but would go on the trips on the wagons any chance I got. We hauled a lot of coal from opencast sites: Windy Arbour, Roughly Brow, Bryn Hall etc. We delivered it to NCB at Pemberton. The site had ceased mining coal, but the stuff was weighed in and the screens/railhead still functioned.

The coal was the property of NCB, so we were not allowed to take ours directly from the opencast production.

This lead to the rather bizarre scenario: we would haul a load of coal from Bryn to the Blundells site at Pem, tip it into the hopper which fed the screens, then drive around to one of the rail wagons, handball a load of coal on board, and then drive it back to Bryn for our retail sales.

There was just one customer though....

Probably had more clout than the UK government...

Maybe had contracts which predated formation of NCB.

Just one customer had coal delivered directly from the opencast mine.

Any guess:



Uncle Sam

Burtonwood air base, that is.

The USAF (United States Air Force) ?

here

Another Road-making/Bryn oddity.

Also during this period, we hauled many loads of red shale from Pearson's shale tip (Ince Moss Colliery) to be used as foundation filling for the, then under construction, Preston Bypass hard shoulders. As you know our first motorway construction: now part of M6.

We all knew that it was unsuitable for this. Even I as a kid knew it to be unsuitable. It can hold within it large amounts of water, and shock/vibration can then create liquefaction and sudden catastrophic structural failure.

Still, the 'men from the ministry' know best: red shale it was that built those foundations.

Within weeks of opening, the problem became manifest.

Trucks on the hard shoulder sunk up to their axles, and when removed left such deep scars that hard shoulders had to be coned off.

Within months the whole shoulder construction had to be re-done!

In Bamfurlong in the 1960s the remains of Bamfurlong Colliery which closed in 1946, which was at the side of the railway just a short distance from where Bamfurlong Station was located, at the Lily Lane bridge, it was full of red shale, the stuff was everywhere in Bamfurlong, and looking across the fields to the large slagheaps which were the Three Ugly Sisters, they were red in colour, so I presume they were composed of red shale too.
But not a trace remains now, and if you go to the bottom of Winstanley Road in Bamfurlong, and look across the fields towards Pemberton, it now looks like the picturesque splendour of the very flat north Cheshire plain

On about the M6 they started making it into a 'Smart Motorway' in 2018 and it is the section between the M62 and the M58 at Orrell, so it's not that far, and it won't be finished until the Spring of 2025, seven years to do the job, and I bet it didn't take that long to build the entire motorway originally.

It's bloody mental

wot do you know fool .

I liked things the way they were.

Loved exploring the industrial dereliction on so many sites to be found.

Loved to climb the Three Sisters, and enjoy the view.

Wanted to be a Petrologist when I grew up: had a fascination with mining, and spent many Sunday securing geological specimens and studying the strata in the opencast cuts.

Could sit for hours watching draglines working.

Wouldn't have swapped it for anything.

PS Dragline still a possible weapon of choice if much overburden to be stripped, but opencast mining the Pem site, as you described would have employed the next generation of kit: hydraulic mining shovels.

There are some photos elsewhere on this site of such machines opencast mining Tan Pit (period?).

Not found photo of earlier hydraulic mining shovel. This is CAT 6040, which is a later (ie this century) machine.