Explore The Edge in Wigan
The Edge, Wigan
The Edge is the home of Today’s Community Church, Postcode Coffee House, The Edge Conferencing & The Edge Arena. It’s located right alongside Wigan Pier with easy access to the motorway network of North West England.
The Edge is a contemporary conferencing venue with excellent facilities and a great range of spaces. The name itself invokes strongly the theme of this Summit, where we will be exploring the fertile edge of our civil society.
Wigan Pier is a beautiful regeneration area, situated on the Leeds-Liverpool Canal, and alive with fascinating history.
To contact The Edge directly about the venue itself, phone: 01942 244460.
Why Wigan?
When plotting this event, the initial co-convenors were looking for a location in one of the many ‘Brexit Towns’ – those places that voted strongly for Brexit. Our reasoning is and was that many of these represent places left behind. By good fortune, we found that 2017 marked the 80th anniversary of George Orwell’s classic tome, The Road to Wigan Pier, which was itself a journey through the post-industrial heartlands of England.
As it happens, most of those towns and cities Orwell toured through were also core Brexit voting areas which fitted perfectly with out intentions. We held our initial planning meeting with 20 organisations at The Old Courts in Wigan at the end of October 2017. Whilst there we also discovered that Gerrard Winstanley, the initiator of The Diggers Movement, was born and raised in the town, and that there is a thriving Wigan Diggers Festival to this day. His declaration ‘From the poor oppressed people of England’ seems a fitting backdrop to the work we wish to carry out in March 2018, over 400 years after his birth.
