Leigh may be best known today as a market town, but its history hides some genuinely startling stories, from a doomed Royalist earl to a Hollywood novelist and 7,000 exhumed bodies.
Here are some interesting facts you might not have known.
All of this information was sourced from the Leigh Town Trail booklet produced by Wigan Council.
A future Hollywood novelist was born on Wilkinson Street
James Hilton, born at 26 Wilkinson Street in 1900, went on to write Goodbye, Mr Chips and Lost Horizon, both adapted into major Hollywood films.
Georgie Fame knocked The Beatles off No.1
Clive Powell, born in 1943 and raised on Cotton Street, became the chart-topping singer Georgie Fame.
His hit The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde displaced The Beatles from the top of the pop charts in the 1960s.
An executed Earl spent his last night in Leigh
Royalist commander the Earl of Derby spent his final night alive at the historic King's Arms in Leigh on October 14, 1651, before being executed the next day in Bolton.
Building the market hall meant exhuming 7,000 bodies
When Leigh's covered market hall was finally built in 1968, after nearly 90 years of campaigning, 7,000 bodies had to be exhumed from the old Parish Graveyard to make way for it.
Troops and cavalry were sent in to quell unrest
The obelisk in Leigh's Civic Square witnessed real drama.
During the 1839 Leythe Fight over voting rights, troops charged 1,000 protesters (only 450 of Pennington's 5,015 residents could vote at the time).
In 1881, a 28-week miners' strike saw 15,000 people march along Church Street, with the Riot Act read at the obelisk and the 12th Hussars deployed to prevent disorder.
Leigh's true spinning jenny inventor got overlooked by history
Local reed-maker Thomas Highs invented early versions of the spinning jenny and water-frame in the 1760s, years before James Hargreaves and Richard Arkwright claimed the credit that made them famous.
An 1885 directory insisted: "It is to Highs' ingenuity we may trace the leading position Lancashire now occupies in the cotton trade."
The town's population grew nearly ninefold in a century
Leigh's townships had a population of about 5,000 in 1801.
By 1911, that figure had exploded to 44,109, fuelled by the rise of textiles, coal mining, and engineering.
Leigh had 10,000 silk weavers at its industrial peak
By 1835, Leigh had become one of the principal production centres for the Lancashire silk industry, employing around 10,000 mainly domestic weavers in the town and surrounding area.
Coal mining vanished from Leigh entirely by 1992
In 1911, 5,782 men and about 200 women were employed in mining around Leigh.
Bickershaw Colliery alone employed 2,500 people by 1899.
The industry disappeared completely by 1992, and Pennington Flash, now a popular nature spot, exists only because of subsidence caused by all that coal extraction.
Public health in Edwardian Leigh was grim
As late as 1906, Leigh had 4,979 privies compared with just 2,349 water closets, and 109 houses were disinfected following a typhoid outbreak in 1898.
It wasn't until after 1917 that all privies were finally converted to modern sewage disposal.
Did you know any of these facts?
If there are any tales of Leigh from years gone by that you would like to share, please email tabitha.wilson@newsquest.co.uk.
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