Preston spreads its wings northwards

On 27 February 1836, the Preston Chronicle carried an article on its page three outlining the development of housing for working people on agricultural land to the north of the town, describing what would become the Plungington and Maudland estates as the century progressed. The two estates were owned by the Tomlinson and Pedder families respectively. The article captures the district as building began right at the start of that development, with work just beginning on the large mills that were to mark the next stage of industrialisation in the town. Roads were unmade, and several still existed only in the dreams of the ambitious developers.

This was the period when the town broke out of its medieval boundaries, Preston Moor had only recently been enclosed and was being laid out to form what was soon being named Moor Park (Moor Park: the first municipal park). To the south, Avenham fields were being sold off for housing. St Peter’s church (Piety and profit in nineteenth-century Preston) had become the first church built outside the town centre, with its foundation stone laid just fourteen years earlier, surrounded by fields on a site between what were to become Adelphi Street and Brook Street, two of the principal streets of the Plungington estate. St Walburge’s church, now so dominant on the district’s skyline, was only being dreamed of at that date.

The writer of the article was hopeful that the siting of the mills and the workers’ houses on the opposite side of the town to Winckley Square would:

‘… supersede all idea (if such were entertained) of building such structures on the south or south west side of the borough, where their erection would be detrimental to the property in those quarters, and destroy the beauty of the finest part of the town – Ribblesdale-place and Avenham.’

The social class division in the town was being cemented, divorcing the south and west from the north and east (an exception was the middle-class estate opened up in Fulwood across from Moor Park). While the Tomlinsons and Pedders were packing the northern district with tight grid lines of through-lobby terraced housing, the Lutwidge family was carrying out a similar exercise in Ribbleton to the east. In the south-west, elegant Winckley Square was being laid out in what was rapidly becoming the town’s most desirable neighbourhood, as witness Nigel Morgan’s description of middle-class housing in the town in his book ‘Desirable Dwellings‘. Avenham Walks was extending on land supplied by one of the Tomlinsons, Avenham and Miller Parks would provide the affluent residents with their pleasure grounds, and a new Avenham Institute would appropriate for the middle classes what had been a Mechanics Institute for the town’s workers.

This last provoked the ire of the social campaigner Joseph Livesey, quoted in ‘Desirable Dwellings’, who condemned the blatant hypocrisy of siting an institution that had been set up to serve the educational needs of the town’s workers on the far side of the town from where those workers were now being housed. Nigel Morgan shows how the middle classes supplanted the working-class members of what is now known as the Harris Institute.

Later, middle-class estates were developed in Ashton and Fulwood. The Ashton development is the subject of a recent UCLan dissertation by Sue Latimer.

The extent to which these housing estates cemented the class divisions in the town can be shown by mapping the districts from which officers and other ranks were recruited for the First World War. In Spring 1919, lists were compiled of all the troops awaiting demobilisation, so that they could vote in the forthcoming general election. Gregg Swarbrick transcribed the list for Preston, and mapping the numbers of officers and other ranks onto the polling districts of the town brings out the class divisions in the town more clearly than words alone can demonstrate.
Great War conscription and Edwardian Preston’s ‘class ceiling’

Biographies of the Pedders and the Lutwidges are already on this website, with the ones for the Tomlinson brothers, William and Thomas, and Thomas’ son, the Preston MP Sir William Tomlinson, in preparation.

The Chronicle article and more maps can be found here: Preston spreads its wings northwards.