Photo-a-Day  (Saturday, 21st June, 2025)

..........................I dream my dreams away.
Underneath the arches, on cobblestones I lay.
It's a popular song from the War Years although it originally dates from 1932.
Flanagan and Allen were a British singing and comedy double act most active during the 1930s and 1940s. Its members were Bud Flanagan (1896 – 1968, born Chaim Weintrop) and Chesney Allen (1894–1982). They were first paired in a Florrie Forde revue, and were booked by Val Parnell to appear at the Holborn Empire in 1929, I cannot find any reference of them appearing at Wigan Hippodrome but who knows.
Perhaps an appropriate, alternative name to Wigan Central would have been 'Flanagan's and Allen's'?

We have very high traffic pollution yet people will still sit at the side of a busy road and breath in toxic fumes.

I was just thinking that myself PeterP. In a town nearby to us....a certain well known coffee shop has tables placed on the pavement by the only road though the town on which the traffic never stops.... it amazes me that people are happy to sit there amid the fumes .
I like the 'arches' being used for a new purpose though !

CAN YOU SPOT THE WIGAN RAT CATCHING CAT?

Takes me back to when I was reading in the Wigan Observer some years ago that planning permission had been given to use the old arches as a business venture.
Wiganers, we're writing in saying it would spoil the old-fashioned look of one of the main routes into town, and the planned double-glazed frontage was a ridiculous idea.
But look at it now, one of the busiest pubs in Wigan, even with its views of the cement mixing plant that's across the road and the rumbling of trains overhead.
So well done Wigan council planners making this happen.

them vehicles fly round that bend coming up wallgate not much protection for those sat out side and inside as well

I’ve been in there with the lads from Hanson concrete across the road Mick last year.

I must admit Flanagan and Allen's would have been a good name, Colin.

Let’s get it right Mick .
It’s a concrete plant , not a cement mixing plant , and it ain’t there any longer . There’s a world of difference between cement and concrete .

Hope I’m not being negative here as I’d hate you to go flouncing off the site clutching your pearls .

Flanagan and Allen's for the name wouldn't have been a good choice, just like Orwell wasn't for the pub at the Wigan Pier.

Under the bridges of Paris it ain’t and a very poor outlook. I wouldn’t want to sit there discussing life over a glass of wine……
Ce-n’est pas l’endroit ideal.”

Mick that was a concrete plant across

Nothing to do with council planners and all to do with the folks who came up with the idea for using the arches as a micro pub etc, only after seeing it done on Coronation Street and Eastenders, and the rail company who owns the property, though it's a lot better now than when those scruffy vehicle windscreens and tyres businesses were there.
Why were those upper white porcelain faced bricks not refaced like the others below them, instead of being painted blue and it peeling off. Going underneath the bridge looks a lot better with being refaced with coloured bricks, rather than when it was all dirty white, and which only got washed down whenever dignitaries were to pass through, though they soon got filthy again with fumes from the traffic and the endless dripping of filthy water.

Leave the name has it is in honour of Wigan's third railway station

I live by a busy road and laugh when window cleaners come knocking !
Free radicals inside our bodies are dancing inside us like Wigan Casino due to pollution.
When the sun shines for a week or more we pour outside and beg for it to feed us its delicious energy of warmth and comfort when in reality it is frying our skins alive !
Deluded people buy sun cremes with all kinds of sun factor numbers believing they will be able to have both the joy and protection . What an insult to the sun we depend on !
In reality the sun will fry you in a pan in the same way the sea will command any who venture - salt and land pollution are the same , they both rob the water from us !
The only people who grow richer( and check how they do) are those selling sun cremes and all their other creames of nonsense , playing on emotional weakness to feed you when water alone can do by itself !
Our human existence from our beginning is based on our greed and the elements of our ever growing wants which we are now inhaling in every passing moment . The respect due is to our human bodies and its ability to cope with such onslaught from basically everywhere, both physically and emotionally. We have adapted to eat pollution daily and fry in the sun. Isn’t evolution wonderful!

I was working for Wigan Council some years ago, and we did the tiling over the old bridge abutments. At the time, I thought it was an awful idea, but now I'm glad I was part of the team that did it.
One of those yellow tiles had my name TOM, painted on it by a Wigan Council sign writer that you can still see to this day.

Wasn’t that tiling done specifically for the millenium or am I mistaken ?

I'm unsure of when it was done Ozy, but I've always thought it was done for when the then queen opened Wigan Pier, though I'm most likely wrong.
At one time it was horrible to walk under the bridge and were counted lucky if you emerged unscathed, that is free from being bombed by a pigeon, or dribbled on by water which most likely had originated from a train toilet being flushed. Then at one time there was a smelly urinal just before the bridge on the same side as the station, where urine would be running along the pavement.

Lovely memories from when I was a child in my old Wigan town, Cyril, take me back there anytime.