Wigan Pier Project – 80th Anniversary Journey

In 1937, Orwell's book about poverty in Northern England shocked the country. Now we are retracing his route – join us as we tell the stories of Austerity Britain

Our journey north began in January 2017, 80 years after Eric Blair – George Orwell’s real name – published the story of his travels to Wigan Pier in 1937.

We began in the snow in Birmingham, where homeless people were already dragging their bedding into an open garage where a homeless man had died a few days earlier from hypothermia.

The last 18 months have been an extraordinary journey through ‘ordinary’ Britain – its cafes, homeless shelters, community centres, cold streets, churches, mosques and foodbanks, meeting people barely surviving on zero and low hours, in slum housing, families struggling to eat and clothe their children, workers showering before work in homeless shelters after sleeping on the streets.

It might have been a depressing journey except for the extraordinary people we met and who you will meet here. Brilliant, funny, clever, insightful, interesting people who are being failed just as the people Orwell described were.

Over the next few months, this Daily Mirror special project will continue to tell these stories all along Orwell’s route – covering Birmingham, Stoke-on-Trent, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Barnsley, Sheffield and Wigan and the places in-between.

“At one time, on one of the little muddy canals that run round the town, there used to be a tumble-down wooden jetty; and by way of a joke someone nicknamed this Wigan Pier. The joke caught on locally, and then the music-hall comedians got hold of it, and they are the ones who have succeeded in keeping Wigan Pier alive as a by-word, long after the place itself had been demolished.”

– George Orwell on Wigan Pier, BBC World Service, 1943

In 1937, Orwell’s famous book exposed to middle class England the levels of poverty in which huge industrialised swathes of people in the north of the country were living in. The welfare state was his generation’s response to that poverty.

80 years on, that welfare safety net is failing. These are the voices of the people falling through.