Wigan Pier Corridor

Placemaking

Masterplan

The Wigan Pier Corridor is the gateway to Wigan town centre from the west. The area comprises a number of key landmark buildings, including the Trencherfield and Eckersley Mill complexes, waterway assets including the Leeds and Liverpool canal and the River Douglas, along with a number of vacant and underutilised sites. Wigan Council own a number of key vacant land assets in the corridor area of a strategic nature.

Project Details

Category: Architecture/ Masterplan/ Placemaking
Site: Wigan, UK
Status: Active

What’s unique about Wigan and the Wigan Pier Corridor?

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Located within just 30 minute distance to Liverpool and Manchester by train and with different transport links to the Northwest Wigan is an ideal commuter town for young professionals who want a more affordable, yet better quality, standard of living.

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From the 19th to mid-20th century, Wigan dominated as a major mill and coal mining town; its industrial history and historical assets, such as the mill complexes and warehouses, can be harnessed to create a distinctive identity.

With its rich cultural and historical heritage Wigan offers an attractive canalside location that could form the backdrop to a variety of experience and uses, including residential, retail, experiential and leisure, whilst creating new start up business spaces and studios for the creative arts alongside community learning & engagement spaces.

Utilising any existing assets, we identified key improvement points and vacant sites along the route and created a series of new targeted interventions along the canalside route, to enliven key vistas and linkage points in order to bring people to the heart of the site.

With a Strategic Regeneration Framework in place, successful progression of wider town centre regeneration ambitions, and changes within the Pier area including the recent change of ownership of Eckersley Mill and development being brough forward by Step Places, both Homes England and Wigan Council recognise the opportunity to deliver change in this area of the town centre.

Our approach to placemaking is about celebrating what makes a place unique - its physical, cultural and social identities - through the built environment. For Wigan Pier, we have considered how its distinctive history and assets can be harnessed to create an exciting destination for people to live, work and play. With new leisure and fitness routes, art and pavilion interventions to draw footfall and create a green loop with the new adjacent wigan pier gateway district.

Designing for connected, healthy communities can support moves towards sustainable prosperity and create diverse, thriving places and viable neighbourhoods.

Minimal interventions in the park zone to make better use of the adjacent green assets and link them to new residential communities, including a potential green ribbon proposed for Eckersley Mill.

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