Coal Town Tries to Build on Grim Legacy : Britain: George Orwell exposed the squalor in Wigan, England, in the 1930s. Now, officials search for ways to attract visitors and cash to the economically anemic area.

Sometimes the past is a curious legacy: The harsher it is, the more valuable its memory. Or so this former coal-mining capital in northwestern England has learned as it has sought to come to grips with its troubled history and with the famous author who made its name synonymous with squalor and desperation in the 1930s.

This is how George Orwell, writing 54 years ago, described “the dreadful environs of Wigan” in his classic book of crusading journalism, “The Road to Wigan Pier”:

“All around was the lunar landscapes of slag-heap, and to the north . . . between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. . . . It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and foul water.”

Orwell put Wigan on the literary map in a way that was most unwelcome to the city fathers, who felt he unfairly blackened the town’s reputation.

But a new generation of officials, desperately searching for ways to attract visitors and cash to this economically anemic area, has taken a different view: They have used the notoriety Orwell bestowed to reclaim the city’s past by restoring Wigan Pier and the surrounding area, opening a historical exhibition and attracting tourists who pay up to $8 each to view depictions of the very poverty Orwell so eloquently condemned.

Where street urchins once scuffled for discarded coal chips, a restored warehouse now houses “The Way We Were,” a multimedia display that shows visitors what it was like inside the dank and dangerous coal mines and slum flats of Wigan’s past.

Wigan Pier, where coal was loaded onto barges for shipping down the Leeds to Liverpool Canal, has been rebuilt, and nearby is a refurbished cotton mill, a canal boat ride and a pub that is named--what else?--the George Orwell.

Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, was a satirist as well as a social critic. Were he alive (he died in 1950) he might well see the humor in Wigan’s attempt to turn a profit from his impassioned attack. Many here believe that such a turnabout is simply fair play.

“There’s a great ambivalence about Orwell in this city--people felt he patronized them,” said David Mather, spokesman for the Wigan Metropolitan Borough Council. “We haven’t promoted George Orwell, but we’ve used his book. We’ve basically been opportunistic. I mean, Orwell used Wigan and got a lot out of it, and you could say we’ve done the same thing back to him.”

Much of Orwell’s Wigan--the stark row houses of the Scholes and Wallgate neighborhoods--has vanished, leveled in the 1960s and ‘70s to make way for public housing. The slums surrounding the canal pier itself have given way to a Ford dealership, a hardware chain store and a bowling alley. Trees, vegetation and a return of wildlife have softened the features of the bleak landscape Orwell described on the outskirts of the metropolitan area, whose population is nearly 300,000.

But if Wigan’s poverty these days has a softer face, it still carries a sting. The decline that began with the first mine closures during the depression years has never really stopped. The official unemployment rate is 12%--”We reckon the real rate is maybe 50% higher than that,” said Mather. The joblessness falls disproportionately on the young.

“If Orwell came back to Wigan, he wouldn’t recognize it himself,” said Anthony Newton, 24, who drives a taxi because he says he can’t find a regular job. “It’s changed that much. It was in bad shape then. It still is, but in a different way.”

Wigan was built on coal and cheap labor. At the peak of its prosperity in 1900, there were 86 pubs, 16 pawnshops and 25,000 men working the town’s mines, turning out tons of sweet-smelling, clean-burning “cannel coal,” a noted local variety. Thousands more were employed in the vast ironworks that produced specialized machinery and tools for the mines, and thousands of women worked in some of the world’s largest textile mills.

Orwell’s book described in merciless detail the dangers of working in the mines and the insensitivity of the companies that ran them. He depicted the squalid conditions of the tenements and the rooming houses where landlords extracted exorbitant rents from tenants. He also recounted scenes of women and children searching the frozen mud for discarded coal chips.

One woman’s face, glimpsed briefly from the train that took Orwell back to London, haunted him most. “I had time to see everything about her--her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold,” he recalled. “She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is 25 and looks 40, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen.”