Preston
What to see
You’ll find accounts of Preston’s tourist attractions and additional information on shopping, eating out etc at Visit Preston and Visit Lancashire. For events coming up go to Visit Preston‘s Events pages.
Links to Preston attractions include:
● Avenham & Miller Parks
● Brockholes Nature Reserve
● Harris Library, Museum and Art Gallery
● Lancashire Infantry Museum
● Preston Bus Station
● Preston Minster
● Preston Statues Trail
● Ribble Steam Railway
● Turbary Woods Owl & Bird Of Prey Sanctuary
Towns of Two Halves extracts:
● “Preston is a frontier town: between land and sea, with what was once the largest enclosed dock in the world; between industrial Lancashire and the more rural north-west; and, since those borders involve historic distinctions, it stands between the past and the future. You could be forgiven for feeling disorientated in Preston.”
● “Some of the city’s buildings have semi-mythical status. Preston Guild is a proverbial expression for something that hardly ever happens; here, east of Market Square, it never stops happening, settling in the skyline like a close encounter. The famously Brutalist Preston Bus Station is like an unpainted ship of the line with empty gun-ports. Along the side of the old Post Office, a neglected row of telephone kiosks (one of which still has a telephone) offer themselves half-heartedly as rental space.”
● “At the bottom of Lune Street there is an imposing memorial to the four Preston cotton workers shot dead on that spot by soldiers suppressing a strike in 1842. The Preston Martyrs Memorial, erected on the 150th anniversary in 1992, recalls Goya’s The Third of May 1808. The four men were aged between 17 and 27.”
These are taken from the updated Preston chapter of Towns of Two Halves, originally published in 2018. To buy a copy, email info@townsof2halves.co.uk.