Residents dream up amusing street names for new estate on site of old Wigan Heinz factory

For locals have been coming up with appropriate and sometimes amusing names for the streets which will eventually run across the site of the one-time Standish Heinz plant. And needless to say the food giant’s famous products and slogans figure large.

Dozens of homes are currently emerging on Bradley Lane and it’s not that the developer has been asking locals, as they sometimes do, for suggestions for new roads’ names based on local references.

No, this was just a piece of social media whimsy from Margaret Cobham who wondered whether the connecting roads between the homes might be given names honouring the site’s industrial pedigree.

Here are some of the suggestions:

Tin Can Alley

Spaghetti Street

Ketchup Close

57th Street

Salad Cream Corner

Pudding Parade

Souper Douper Drive

Heinz first came to Wigan in 1946, taking over what was a former munitions factory on Bradley Lane.

As the company rapidly expanded it then also began developing a new plant at Kitt Green which opened in 1959 and the two ran in parallel until the Standish operation was ended in 1981.

Heinz products have been present on British households’ shelves since Victorian times, with the company first selling goods at the upmarket Fortnum & Mason store in London in 1886.

The company itself had been founded by Henry J Heinz in 1869, in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania, US. It still employs hundreds at Kitt Green.