Bolton is lively and vibrant with a lot going on throughout the year. We meet people from four of the town’s most important institutions who are helping to drive it forward while respecting its proud past.
DAVE BAGLEY
URBAN OUTREACH
It would be no exaggeration to describe Dave Bagley as Bolton’s Conscience. This practical Christian heads the town’s biggest and most diverse charity, Urban Outreach.
In just one year – and counting only food-related services providing food parcels hampers, lunches and children’s meals – the charity’s work impacted 127,849 people. It’s all a huge leap from 1990 when Dave and his wife Chris founded the charity from their attic, beginning by providing short-term accommodation for young people with nowhere to live.
By the late 1990s, their growing concern for the street homeless prompted the launch of overnight café Winter Watch, offering hot food, shelter, warmth and friendship. Today, Urban Outreach gives a helping hand wherever individuals need it – the young, the elderly, hungry children, sex workers, ex-offenders and lonely adults.
The projects and figures are staggering: around 2,000 volunteers, food to around 250,000 people during the pandemic, opening the charity’s own 17,500 sq ft Humanitarian Hub, 41,100 food parcels packed and delivered, 71,450 children’s lunches provided.
Dave, a trained chef with an abiding love for cooking and for the all-round importance of decent food, says his ‘dream is to have every child able to cook by the time they leave school.’
He looks on Bolton as his ‘first settled home – the place where my own flesh and blood were born’. This is an understandable sentiment from a man dumped as a baby on the steps of a Barnardo’s children’s home.
But he is proud of what the charity and the people of Bolton have achieved over the years, especially over lockdown and since. Dave pays tribute to their uniquely warm nature and is optimistic for the town’s future – achieved, as always, together.
SHARON BRITTAN
CLUB SAVIOUR
Sharon Brittan’s path into football club ownership has been far from smooth and simple. The business consortium she headed in 2019 finally took over Bolton Wanderers FC after the process had stalled several times and the club was just days away from liquidation.
Since then, the huge problems created by a global pandemic and getting the finances back on an even keel continued that rocky path.
In 2023, however, life – the usual vagaries of football competition accepted – is good. The club is both successful and stable and, when we chatted, on the way to the EFL Cup Final and doing well in League One.
Sharon Brittan herself is a natural enthusiast – for life, for football and for people.
Born in Didsbury, Manchester, she spent her childhood supporting Blackburn Rovers with her dad and grandad, kicking off a life-long love of the game.
As a very successful businesswoman with directorships in different fields, she always wanted to extend her interests into football and Bolton Wanderers provided it.
She acknowledges she has become an ‘honorary Boltonian – and very proud to be so’ and is also proud of the management team she has assembled at the club.
‘If you gather together the right people around you, you will go forward in the right way – it just happens,’ she says.
The mother of four says she has never suffered the kind of abuse often common in some areas of football. ‘People in Bolton have always been really lovely to me,’ she says. ‘I’ve had grown men in tears thanking me for saving the club because it’s so important to them.
LOTTE WAKEHAM
THEATRE DIRECTOR
Lotte Wakeham was in the middle of casting for a ground-breaking new production at Bolton’s Octagon theatre where she is Creative Director. She couldn’t help the enthusiasm bubbling over because she is genuinely excited about a play called The Book of Will. This centres on the players’ company in the 1600s which gathered together William Shakespeare’s work and which will undoubtedly capture the headlines when it’s shown in the new season.
Lotte has become used to positive headlines since she moved to the Octagon from Scarborough’s famous Stephen Joseph Theatre. She was enticed by seeing imaginative Octagon productions like Gulliver’s Travels, which took place in Queens Park, and Summer Holiday involving different venues around the town.
‘I was very keen to continue to stage such impressive shows,’ she says. And it’s plain she has.
Her experience over 10 years as a freelance director has brought a unique quality to the Octagon’s theatrical choices. These have recently seen the world premiere of best-selling novel The Book Thief and the return of Bill Naughton’s famous Spring and Port Wine with its masterly casting of Les Dennis.
She is very aware of how the people of Bolton and Bolton Council have always viewed the Octagon as very much “theirs” and supported it accordingly, including its £12 million development.
‘After the pandemic, people started to come back to our shiny new theatre but we also found a lot of new people visiting for the first time,’ she says. ‘I think that once people come and enjoy a performance here, they will keep coming.
‘We’ve found that everyone wants a great night out with all kinds of productions because it’s about the experience. Towns need theatres like the Octagon working in the community for everyone including children, young people and older people.’
PAUL SALVESON
RAIL EXPERT
Paul Salveson grew up alongside the loco sheds in Great Lever, Bolton, sparking a life-long passion for railways. When he was looking for something to fill his time while he was home from university at 20, it was the giant Horwich Loco Works which called to him.
Here, he became a blacksmith’s striker, doing exactly what it sounds like and hitting the sizzling metal where the skilled blacksmith indicated “but I don’t think I was very good at it!” he recalls, laughing.
He left after around a year to become a railway guard in a move that saw him making journeys from Blackburn to Carlisle through stunning Ribble Valley and Dales scenery.
His rail interests grew over the years and he served as Head of Government and Community Strategies at Northern Rail and as group advisor, Community Rail at Arriva UK Trains. Today, he is president of the South East Lancashire Community Rail Partnership and an acknowledged expert.
His fascination with local history ran on parallel lines to his love of railways. His PhD at the University of Salford was Region, Class, Culture: Lancashire Dialect Literature and he is a solid Lancastrian at heart.
He is anchored firmly in the literary world as a historian and writer with works including Socialism with a Northern Accent and The Settle-Carlisle Railway. His new book Lancastrians – Mills, Mines and Minarets is published in June by Hurst.
Local history remains an abiding fascination and he is a visiting professor in Worktown Studies at the University of Bolton.
He sees how Bolton’s past ‘with its rich associations with the textile industry’ and individual stories have helped shape the present. Particularly, he appreciates the value of Bolton’s diverse culture ‘not just in food but in how successive waves of migration will potentially serve Bolton well, economically, socially and culturally.’
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