In Retrospect: Leigh People's Paper

‘Write us an article, you don’t have to be a journalist, none of us are.’

    - Leigh People's Paper, Issue 1

It’s February 1973 and on the cover of a debut Leigh People’s Paper, its editors decry the existing local press as failing the locale. They invite anyone, journalist or not, to send in their views.

A non-profit, independent outlet for Leigh, Leigh People’s Paper would last 10 years and was distributed amongst local newsagents for just two pence a copy (the equivalent of around 20p today). Coming into existence thanks to a loan from the Vicar of Leigh, the paper was produced by a small group of volunteer writers and cartoonists. Providing commentary on local issues of housing, insufficient wages and an ineffectual council – even national criticism of a racist press – not much has changed, eh? Scanning each sun-bleached and staple-rusted edition it’s a struggle to submerse yourself in the detail – I weren’t around for the nurses’ strike of ’74, believe it or not – but what I can see in each and every copy is a grit, an honesty and the total absence of defeatism.

Flicking through the stack of archive copies held at Leigh Town Hall, I saw something so at odds with my conception of local politics that I felt myself inspired by this plucky group of print-making misfits. In contrast to today’s reactionary NIMBY-ism, the pothole outrage, this stuff was quite boldly shining light on the exploits of local power-mongers within a clear, collectivist narrative. Demonstrating very clearly that politics exists beyond the ballot box, even, especially, if The Red Team wins.

Physical publications like this are necessary. They’re valuable because they provide a counter to that widespread view of, so-called, ex-“red-wall” areas like Leigh: that they’re brimming with nationalists, reactionaries, aggro-individualists. It’s not true, but these preconceptions go unchecked when the people in question have no vehicle for expression. The history withers away, the opposition finally defeated. In absence of this collective cultural identity “Leigh” becomes an amorphous blob viewed through the lenses of commentariat parachutes; it’s people made malleable by a billionaire-owned press or a middle-class lacking the backbone to cast cynical views as their own.

Leigh, like many forgotten towns across our isle, deserves better. The amateurs that cobbled together Leigh People’s Paper knew that back in the seventies. Isn’t it time we started shouting again?

dedicated to the makers of Leigh People's Paper

all excerpts of Leigh People’s Paper are credited to their original authors 
and have been reproduced here with their kind permission

images reproduced with permission from copies held at Archives: Wigan & Leigh