Atherton

In 1999, two years after I was born, the last cotton mill in Atherton closed. Empty and unoccupied, Ena Mill’s hollow shell stood throughout my childhood as a testament to a used-up town. As Atherton moved into the turn of the century, it was exhausted; used up and forgotten.

My great granddad died whilst working underground in one of the town’s coal mines. He was just one of many martyrs to the cause of industrialisation: eight dead in Chanters Colliery, 1957; 27 dead in Lovers Lane Colliery, 1872; five dead in Gibfield Colliery, 1850; and of course, 344 dead in the Pretoria Pit Disaster, 1910. My granddad followed in his father’s footsteps, but lived long enough to see the last colliery in Atherton close.

In the wake of the hundreds of years of sacrifice, of the lives given, the hard work toiled, the resources used and the air polluted, Atherton faced a question: what was it for, and where to now? No-one had any answers, and no-one any money to fund whatever the answer could have been. The profits that had been made here had left here, and with them travelled the spirit of all the workers who had given their lives in hope of some future prosperity.

Thus I was born spiritless and futureless, my life lacking content and substance, like an empty mill or forgotten mine. Those unanswered questions were destined to hang over my head as I grew up. They seemed to lurk in every corner of the town I spent my afternoons cycling through. All around me were the remnants of decay. Nothing new ever seemed to happen; the same shops, cafes, and take-aways through each day. If they ever changed it was only to pull down their shutters one last time, disappearing into a graveyard of lost economy.

I lived on a cul-de-sac — a dead- end street in a dead-end town, sitting stagnant on a road going nowhere. By the time I started college I was working a job at the McDonald’s in Middlebrook next to Bolton Wanderers’ football stadium. McDonald’s was another foreign factory, just like the mills and the mines, imported from a far-off land to suck out local wealth in return for cheaply made hamburgers. Bolton never won. During the years that I worked there the team teetered on financial collapse and were relegated down to League One. The football shared the same fate as the town, sinking into debt as it receded away from a past importance. Naturally, the game never had much draw to me, my only stake in the results were the bitter moods of the fans that I served.

As I turned 18, I was bitter too. I had this sense that the future I was promised was fading. I felt the world falling apart, as if cracks and chasms were opening up the ground where I stood. Each monotonous shift at McDonald’s seemed like a mountain to climb, demanding all of my physical and mental strain, yet all I got in return was £4.50 an hour. I gave more than I received. I was being used- up. I was tired, bored, and miserable.

Laburnam Mill, Atherton (1982) + Ronald McDonald

My pittance wage granted me some freedom, though. For the first time I watched the numbers in my bank account grow, and in them I saw a potential way out. Every Friday at Runshaw College was a “study day,” meaning we had the day free from lessons. In the afternoon I would take the 582 bus down to Leigh and walk to the Cineworld on Loom Retail Park – named after the looms that once spun cotton in the town’s mills.

Cineworld stands tall, a chrome black monolith towering over the rest of the retail park, the only cinema in town. The smell of freshly popped corn reminded me of childhood trips to Disney World, the sugary drinks and the wall of pick ‘n’ mix sweetened my senses. As I entered the doors I left the world outside behind me. The foyer led through to the dark tunnel, taking me past each screen and into mine.

The staff started to recognise my face. For Christmas that year, my parents bought me a Cineworld Unlimited Card – free films for a year. Now, I took the bus to the cinema without wanting to watch anything in particular. I watched whatever was on, sometimes not leaving until I had seen up to three films. I kept each ticket and blu- tacked them up on the door of my wardrobe.

The films on the cinema screen did not belong to the world that I did. They were imported, detached, existing in a world of their own. But it was precisely this quality that made them so appealing. Disillusioned and unengaged with my material life in a decaying town, I longed for an arm to reach down from the sky and pull me up and out into an ideal.

Movies were this gateway. The bigger the scale, the more marvellous the set pieces, the further I lost myself within them. I wanted anything that would pull my mind as far away from my body as possible. Marvel was in full swing, and I became increasingly consumed by the lore of its on-screen world. Above all, this was the year of the return of Star Wars. It seemed to be all I talked about with anyone, all I ever really thought about. When The Force Awakens finally came out, I went to the midnight opening with some friends, and went on to watch it again and again. Before its cinema run ended, I had seen the film six times.

Growing up in Atherton always had this paradox. My head was wrapped up in the most fantastic dream-worlds, whilst my body faced a decaying town. The unappealing rot of my material surroundings propelled me further into the dreams of the cinema screen, but the further I travelled into these dreams the wider the distance grew between my mind and my body, my dreams and my reality, where I wanted to be and where I was. The wider this gap became, the harder it was to balance between the two. I was split — caught between two opposing worlds.

Whilst my work and my wealth were sucked up and out of my town, my dreams and my desires were imported down into the town. I do not belong to myself; I am moulded and directed by a world above and without me.

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Adam Lord

image credits

cover image - courtesy of Adam Lord
Fred Dibnah at Laburnam Mill (1982) - Maurice Tyrer, wiganworld.co.uk