Post by doktorb🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ on Oct 30, 2023 11:12:21 GMT
Better people than I could write this profile. This contains most of my original post for Leigh. andrewteale wrote the original Bolton West profile, from which Atherton is added to Leigh. I don't know enough about Atherton to include much here.
Faced with Leigh, a constituency with boundaries barely brushed by an administrator's pencil since the 1890s, Internet searches run wild. Before you realise what you've done, there are 50 browser tabs open and your laptop is trying to throw itself out of the window. This is a symptom of wanting to scour websites for every potential paragraph-filling statistic, and of realising that Leigh is not particularly that interesting to write about.
Faced with Leigh, a constituency with boundaries barely brushed by an administrator's pencil since the 1890s, Internet searches run wild. Before you realise what you've done, there are 50 browser tabs open and your laptop is trying to throw itself out of the window. This is a symptom of wanting to scour websites for every potential paragraph-filling statistic, and of realising that Leigh is not particularly that interesting to write about.
Maybe this is unfair. Leigh is based where traditional Lancashire meets traditional Cheshire, at a point where both industrial and geological history meet. These are the flat, coal seamed landscapes of the outer reaches of what is now Greater Manchester, where the railway between Manchester and Liverpool made its way through tricky terrain, perhaps amongst the most challenging for Victorian engineers. Numerous halts and stations which once stood here, for passengers and coal-based freight, have long since vanished into history, amongst them Leigh's own station, and others at Lowton, Pennington, Tyldesley, and Astley. Railway engineers, enthusiasts and generally interested types alike will know of Chat Moss, the peat-bog which almost stopped the railways from connecting the original northern powerhouses. The town of Leigh sits approximately 4-5 miles northwest of the Moss, with the engineering marvel of the 'floating' railway running to its south. Satellite images show where Leigh's former railway track bed ran, curving away from the town into Worsley and Salford: it remains one of the largest population centres in the UK with no railway station.
The scattering of towns in this constituency hark back to a proud, long-lasting Labour voting tradition, but as with the whole of Wigan Metropolitan Borough Council, this Leave-supporting collection of ex-mining and ex-manufacturing communities don't give Labour an easy ride these days. This is an overwhelmingly white, working class seat, barely 4% of the population were born outside the UK, and with fewer managerial employment figures than the regional average, fewer higher level qualifications than neighbouring seats, it is not surprising to see Leigh classified as a constituency of "somewheres", far less likely to have the means or desire to travel for employment far beyond their own immediate surroundings. All three components of Wigan MBC have Conservative voting 'segments' amongst their otherwise monumentally Labour-voting towns: in Leigh, the traditionally blue-leaning areas include Lowton to the south/southwest, and Astley-Mossley Common in the southeast, where the East Lancs Road snakes towards Worsley, Swinton, and ultimately Manchester.
Boundary changes take Atherton from Bolton West and place it here, adding it to a consistency name for the first time. This is a "Bolton-leaning" town, on former mining land and where a cotton mill closed at the turn of the 21st century. Atherton is on the Wigan-Bolton railway line, and is prime territory for commuting into both Bolton and Manchester; the promise of Metrolink trams coming here is often made and resent looks realistic. In keeping with the rest of the Borough of Wigan, this is a predominantly British-born, white town, and to borrow a phrase from Merseymike, for a Metropolitan Borough it doesn't feel very metropolitan. You may have heard that Atherton was chosen as the location for a "Pound Pub", a sort of budget airline boozer. Having attracted every kind of anti-social behaviour imaginable, it soon closed.
Boundary changes take Atherton from Bolton West and place it here, adding it to a consistency name for the first time. This is a "Bolton-leaning" town, on former mining land and where a cotton mill closed at the turn of the 21st century. Atherton is on the Wigan-Bolton railway line, and is prime territory for commuting into both Bolton and Manchester; the promise of Metrolink trams coming here is often made and resent looks realistic. In keeping with the rest of the Borough of Wigan, this is a predominantly British-born, white town, and to borrow a phrase from Merseymike, for a Metropolitan Borough it doesn't feel very metropolitan. You may have heard that Atherton was chosen as the location for a "Pound Pub", a sort of budget airline boozer. Having attracted every kind of anti-social behaviour imaginable, it soon closed.
At Parliamentary level, Leigh has returned Labour MPs from the 1920s until December 2019, when Jo Platt became the sole Wigan MP to fall to Brexit-fuelled Conservative opposition. James Grundy became the first Tory MP for this area in modern parliamentary history, and for that matter, pretty much ancient parliamentary history too: the 1st Viscount Cross and John Ireland Blackburne represented the sprawling South West Lancashire constituency, of which this was a small part, in the 19th century. On somewhat derisory turnouts, current Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham secured two healthy vote shares upto the 2010 general election, at which he dropped 15 percentage points to an array of local independents, a Christian, and the combined forces of (a very rare) BNP candidate and (a very common) UKIP nominee. The rot had set in, for UKIP shot up to 20% in 2015 alongside a moderate Conservative increase, the prelude to the Tories jumping to take the seat in 2019 on a 12% swing. For context, the 2015 local elections to Wigan council saw Labour take each and every ward except two: Lowton East in Leigh being one of these. Lowton stayed blue in 2018 and 2019, the only island of opposition to Labour in the constituency. Perhaps, then, it is unfair to say Leigh is not interesting to write about, because in this loyally Labour voting, all-white, former coal mining industrial slice of southern Lancashire, something stirred amongst the electorate which very few people truly predicted beforehand. There is always something to write about if you dig deep.
