On this day … 6 November 1878

The Preston Guardian reported that local businessmen were calling on the council to strip out the granite sets in Fishergate and replace them with wooden blocks. They saw it as the only way to bring silence to the street, where the clattering of hundreds of horseshoes and iron-shod wheels was becoming increasingly deafening.

It was so bad that the councillors themselves could not hear themselves think in their council chamber in the old Town Hall on Fishergate, as the Preston Chronicle, reported:

‘The din from rumbling, rattling wheels which finds its way into the great room of our Town Hall, is most annoying and intolerable. It is equally offensive and insufferable all along the street. Conversation cannot be properly and agreeably carried on in any of the shops which directly line the street, with open doors.

‘The racket of wheels the chaos of din which strikes the ears is most violent and bewildering … Saying nothing of the murderous morning wheel rattlings, rollings and rumblings which frequently disturb people in their bedrooms, the daily din of carriages, and waggons in the leading street of the town, is most outrageous …

This added to the other problems in the street which was becoming a no-go area for pedestrians because:

‘Fishergate has for several months been in a really discreditable condition Its pavement is full of indentations is most uneven, awkward, and dangerous. Some time ago, a most child-like and fatuous attempt was made to modify or rectify the defects in it by commingled doses of coal tar and Carnforth gravel. The “improvement” was of a most transient character; it just amounted to the throwing away of so much money; and now the pavement is worse than ever.’

The paper backed the call for the introduction of wood paving:

‘A correspondent in to-day’s issue suggests that a portion of this thoroughfare the length which passes the Town Hall should be wood-paved, so that those who attend concerts, lectures, &c., in that building may be preserved from the vile vehicular nuisance which now distracts their attention and mars their enjoyment. This is a judicious suggestion.’

The Chronicle wanted the wood blocks laid the whole length of Fishergate, and attacked the new borough surveyor who it believed was proposing to relay the street with stone:

‘Fairly good wood, if compactly set, could hardly be more perishable than the stones Iast put down in Fishergate, whilst they would be much more comfortable for riders, drivers and the general public. In some large towns the trial named is being made, and circumstances now favour it in Preston.’

In fact, the paper was being unfair to the borough surveyor, who also favoured wood paving, as the paper accepted in its following issue, where it acknowledged that:

‘… the Borough Surveyor has a considerable regard for wood-paving has, in fact, no objection to urge against it, except one based upon economy. Wood-paving, he thinks, is more expensive than that of the stone kind …’

The Chronicle urged that economy was not the determining factor when it came to the comfort of its readers:

‘The laws of progress, of common hearing, common comfort, and common sense, are dead against the pestiferous vehicular din inflicted upon the public through stone-set thoroughfares; and whilst wood may not be the ultimate remedy of the evil, it is the most likely modifier of it at the present.

But such arguments could not sway the town’s councillors, and the experiment was never tried.

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Source
Anyone with a Lancashire County Library card can read the Preston Chronicle and many more papers for free here: https://link.gale.com/apps/BNCN?u=lancs&aty=rpas