Garden Renovations in Wigan

Wigan grew on the coalfield and the landscape still shows it.

The flashes south of the town centre — the shallow lakes left where old workings settled — are still on the map, and the Leeds–Liverpool Canal threads through the middle of the town past Wigan Pier.

Ground that has been worked, tipped or filled at some point over the last two centuries does not behave like ground that has been left alone.

That matters in a practical way rather than a dramatic one.

Where a lawn sits wet from October to March, or a patio has dropped away from the house, or a path has gone hollow underfoot, the cause is usually below the surface: compacted subsoil, a fall running the wrong way, or a made-up layer that has settled unevenly.

Laying a new surface straight over that repeats the same problem in better materials.

A renovation is the chance to deal with it properly — digging out to something firm, setting falls and a drainage route that take water away from the house, re-levelling where the ground has moved, and only then rebuilding the surface on top.

We cover Wigan town and the districts around it — Pemberton, Orrell, Winstanley, Worsley Mesnes, Beech Hill, Whelley, Ince-in-Makerfield and Goose Green — along with Hindley and Aspull on the Bolton side, Standish and Shevington to the north, and Ashton-in-Makerfield to the south.

Leigh, Atherton and Westhoughton sit between Wigan and our base in Bolton, Greater Manchester, so the whole corridor is inside the working area.

The borough really is two different jobs in one place: compact plots near the centre where every inch has to work, and generous suburban and semi-rural gardens on the edges with room for a full transformation.

A renovation scales to either — what changes is the amount of groundwork, not the approach.