On this day … 10 August 1844

The Preston Guardian reported the laying of the foundation stone for the Literary and Philosophical Institution at the corner of Winkley Square and Cross Street.

The new building had on its Winckley Square side, the Winckley Club, with the old grammar school on the Cross Street side. Together, the three buildings provided a harmonious and attractive collection, now sadly long gone.

The origin of the institution might not have been so harmonious. Hardwick, in his History of Preston, described it as ‘one of the chief architectural ornaments of the town’, but hinted at its origin in a falling out at the Institution for the Diffusion of Knowledge round the corner in Cannon Street, ‘This society originated in a slight misunderstanding with the committee and some of the members of the Institution in Cannon-street, in 1840.’

This ‘slight misunderstanding’ was possibly more serious, for it resulted in two rival organisations vying for the support of the more intellectually-minded of the Preston townsfolk, a rivalry that would have continued when, in 1849, the Cannon Street institution transferred to its new headquarters, the Avenham Institution, now known as the Harris Institute, facing Avenham Walk.

The original Cannon Street institution, opened in 1828, was designed to serve as a mechanics’ institute for the workers of the town. And in its early days, that was what it did; in later years earning the praise of one of Victorian England’s leading scientists whose early interest in science was stimulated when he attended lectures there when a lowly clerk in the town.

That scientist was John Tyndall, one of the pioneers of climate science, who came to Preston from his native Ireland to work with the Ordnance Survey. He was the second person to demonstrate the greenhouse gas effect (the first was an American woman, Eunice Foote, but her work received much less attention at the time).

In one of his letters home to his father, he reveals how the Cannon Street institution was meeting the needs of the town’s working class, hungry for education:

‘I am just after returning from hearing a lecture by the Curate of the parish church of Preston in the lecture room of the Mechanic’s Institution of which I have been a member these three months. We have had a very interesting course of lectures during the winter – one every week. There are much greater facilities here for the acquirement of information than in Ireland, and as far as my time and circumstances permit I avail myself of all.’

The transfer to what was to later become the Harris Institute in a more middle-class and then somewhat remote part of the town, both socially and geographically, disgusted one of the founders of the Cannon Street institution, Joseph Livesey. He predicted that it would simply serve what correspondents to the local papers took to calling the Winckley Square ‘aristocracy’ and their friends. He wrote in his paper, the Preston Guardian:

‘If the building be intended as an ornament to a part of the town that needs it the least … nobody ought to complain except perhaps, those members who are attached to Cannon Street … [But] a more unlikely site could scarcely have been chosen. It is quite at an outside corner of the town, and convenient only to the comparatively wealthy. And not only so, but it will become less and less central as the town extends.’

So in place of a mechanics’ institute, Preston now had a pair of rival institutions serving the needs of a local privileged elite. The result benefitted no-one: not the workers, who had lost their Cannon Street institution, and possibly not the middle-class, called on to support two expensive buildings offering similar facilities within a short distance of each other.

The result was a short life for the Lit and Phil. In 1878, the corporation took over the building for its new Free Library, recently opened and until then housed in a basement room at the town hall, paying the institution £150 for its books and museum items. The corporation got something of a bargain, for there were about 4,000 books, and these meant the new library began life well stocked.

The Avenham Institution had a similarly short life, and would not seem to have benefitted from the demise of its rival, for in 1882 it was taken over by the Harris trustees and renamed the Harris Institute.

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Sources
Hardwick’s History of Preston
Hewitson’s History of Preston