A mechanics’ institute was opened in Cannon Street, Preston, moving in 1849 to the newly-built Avenham Institution in front of Avenham Walk. That building was renamed the Harris Institute in 1882, following an injection of cash from the will of Edmund Harris. Today, the Harris Institute has new owners who are planning a new future for the building.
It was named the Institution for the Diffusion of Knowledge when it opened in Cannon Street, and kept that name until it became the Harris Institute. Despite its grandiose title, at its outset it was simply a mechanics’ institute, one of the many similar organisations in nineteenth-century Britain providing adult education for working-class men.
It maintained that ostensible purpose when it moved to Avenham. According to Anthony Hewitson in his description of the Avenham Institution in his History of Preston: ‘It was built chiefly for the working classes – was intended to provide for them, at a cheap rate, newspapers, books, class instruction, &c. …’.
The University of Central Lancashire appropriated the Cannon Street institution to describe its own birth:
‘We have a long and proud history, which can be traced back to 1828. We believe in the spirit of opportunity for all, which is the same motto and ethos as when we were created as the Institution for the Diffusion of Knowledge.’
UCLan goes on to appropriate the Avenham Institution: ‘Following a substantial donation from the Trustees of Edmund Robert Harris, we changed our name to the ‘Harris Institute’ (emphases added).
This does rather smack of a foundation myth. It was a story that was retold on the 190th anniversary of the establishment of the Cannon Street Institution in 2018, when UCLan took charge of a plaque dedicated to one of the institution’s founders, the temperance campaigner, Joseph Livesey, describing him as ‘the man who co-founded the institution that eventually became the University as we know it today’. He ‘was heavily involved in the founding of UCLan or, as it was known in 1828, the Institute for the Diffusion of Knowledge’.
Such a retelling would probably have provoked hollow laughter from the original founders, including especially Joseph Livesey, who viewed the move to Avenham as just one example of the way the middle classes appropriated resources originally intended for the whole town, for their private and exclusive use. Really, the UCLan account is more hagiography than history.
An alternative and more nuanced account is provided by the Preston historian Nigel Morgan in describing the benefits enjoyed by those living in the Winckley Square district in the nineteenth century:
‘Not only was it south-west of the town centre, and therefore usually up-wind of all the reeking chimneys (multiplying from month to month), but the natural boundary of the river prevented any further industrial development in that direction.
‘To these natural advantages, the residents of the area in the 1840s added social advantages, either as private citizens collaborating with one another in clubs and societies, or as members of the Corporation; which sometimes seems to have been much the same thing.
‘It is hard to avoid the impression that what they were really doing was appropriating institutions which belonged to the town as a whole. These were the Grammar School, the Literary and Philosophical Institution, the Gentlemen’s Newsroom, and the Mechanics Institute … all removed into the Square or close to it from premises formerly located in Stoneygate, the Corn Exchange, the old Guildhall, and Cannon Street, respectively.
‘The first three were built on a site at the north corner of Winckley Square and Cross Street … Traditionally the ancient Grammar School existed for the education of the sons of the freemen of the borough … When the Corporation’s Grammar School Committee proposed that the school should be moved to ‘a more suitable building’… Some councillors objected that the Grammar School, which ought to be for the benefit of the poor and the sons of mechanics and such like, would then become exclusive to the sons of gentlemen who could afford the fees. But this argument was defeated, the new school was built in Cross Street, the fees were raised, and in 1845 there were only two sons of the ‘poor freemen’ among its pupils.’
Nigel continued with a description of the appropriation of the Cannon Street institute, which:
‘… was hijacked from its premises in Cannon Street … It had been established in 1828 to encourage self-help adult education for all classes, but especially working men, with the ideal of ‘perfect equality’, and by 1835 its 300 members included 44 mechanics, 40 labourers and porters. 20 shoemakers, 24 tailors, and so on. … Unfortunately ‘perfect equality’ did not last very long, and by the early 1840s working men were a minority among bankers, professional men and ‘gentlemen’.
These new members, encouraged by the corporation, then bought the site on which the Harris Institute was built, provoking the scorn of Joseph Livesesy:
‘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.’
Nigel commented:
‘He might have said the same about the Corporation’s plans for a public park, on lands which it had just acquired on the bank of the river below Ribblesdale Place. This purchase, of what is now Avenham Park, had been recommended by the Mayor (John Addison) with such breathtaking hypocrisy that it must have been unconscious:
“With respect … to the particular classes whose advantage was chiefly contemplated … they must recollect that they are those who have little leisure, except during certain hours of the day … this made it the more necessary to provide for them near their homes.”
Nigel concludes:
‘The Cross Street buildings having been demolished and replaced with modern offices, only the Avenham Institute and the Park are left as architectural evidence of the way the new middle classes of early Victorian Preston feathered their own nests in this area.’
In fairness to UCLan, it would seem more likely that it was indeed the Institution for the Diffusion of Knowledge, and that Useful was added colloquially. The local newspapers certainly referred to it by the former name apart from a very few exceptions.
And Joseph Livesey himself wasn’t averse to hijacking an organisation aimed at working men, when Preston Freehold Land Society’s fine aim of enabling ‘tradesmen and industrious operatives’ to own land swiftly turned into the Fulwood Park estate ‘inhabited by gentlemen whose business was in Preston’.
I totally agree with you about Livesey, as you will see from what I have written about him on this site. But that does not negate his comments in this case. Agreed that the Preston Chronicle, especially its correspondents, did often omit the ‘Useful’, although not always. And when the middle-class ‘hijackers’ were appealing for funds to build the Avenham Institute in the 1840s, it was for the Institution for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. But I’m probably being unfair to UCLan as you say, so I’ve removed the offending ending from the above paragraph: The University of Central Lancashire appropriated the Cannon Street institution to describe its own birth, dropping the ‘Useful’ from its original title in the process. I’ve also removed it from the post on Facebook.
In fairness to UCLan, it would seem more likely that it was indeed the Institution for the Diffusion of Knowledge, and that Useful was added colloquially. The local newspapers certainly referred to it by the former name apart from a very few exceptions.
And Joseph Livesey himself wasn’t averse to hijacking an organisation aimed at working men, when Preston Freehold Land Society’s fine aim of enabling ‘tradesmen and industrious operatives’ to own land swiftly turned into the Fulwood Park estate ‘inhabited by gentlemen whose business was in Preston’.
I totally agree with you about Livesey, as you will see from what I have written about him on this site. But that does not negate his comments in this case. Agreed that the Preston Chronicle, especially its correspondents, did often omit the ‘Useful’, although not always. And when the middle-class ‘hijackers’ were appealing for funds to build the Avenham Institute in the 1840s, it was for the Institution for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. But I’m probably being unfair to UCLan as you say, so I’ve removed the offending ending from the above paragraph: The University of Central Lancashire appropriated the Cannon Street institution to describe its own birth, dropping the ‘Useful’ from its original title in the process. I’ve also removed it from the post on Facebook.