The dramatic transformation of Preston

A major new book on the architecture of the British Isles takes Preston as its starting point for its chapter discussing the transformation of towns and cities in the early years of the industrial revolution. The book is Architecture in Britain and Ireland, 1530-1830 by Steven Brindle, senior properties historian at English Heritage. It has been published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and is being distributed by Yale University. It is an expensive and weighty work, costing £60 and weighing in at six pounds.

In the book, Steven explains why he settled on Preston to illustrate his discussion of the transformation:

‘The most vivid way of picturing the growth of the rising towns is through historic maps, but the biggest towns grew so much that the ‘later’ map, reproduced in a book of this size, would not be legible in any detail. Preston in Lancashire offers a more manageable, telling example. In 1774 a survey was made of this ancient market town, which had been the centre of county society for over a century but had hardly grown beyond its medieval core. Another map of Preston was made in 1844. In seventy years its population had multiplied nine times, from 6,000 to 54,000, and the later map shows the sprawling shape of a modern town.’

He then goes on to describe that transformation of Preston’s urban landscape:

‘In 1774 Preston’s richer townspeople probably still lived on the main streets, Fishergate and Friargate, like their equivalents in Chelmsford (see Chapter 8). After 1860 a smart new residential area developed off Fishergate around Winckley Square, and by 1844 further streets of fine terrace houses and villas had sprung up in Avenham to the south. Many English towns developed smart residential districts of this kind, for example Liverpool’s Georgian area. Larger towns like Liverpool and Bristol had a more numerous elite and were developing outer suburbs as well, with villas in spacious grounds. Preston’s suburbs developed later; the 1844 map shows the first streets of a smart new district in Moorfields to the north, but very few houses had been built there.

‘The 1844 map shows new infrastructure in the shape of the railway and the Lancaster Canal, whose goods yards and basin take up large areas. The new, densely packed streets to the west, north and east were for industry and the poor. Groups of new streets have visibly been laid out in relation to each other, but overall the growth seems random and unplanned. Some of the most telling details in the map are the patches of blue, all relating to large buildings. These are the millponds that fed the engines driving the tall spinning-mills that were the principal reason for the town’s growth, for Preston, like many other places, had specialised. It had become a cotton town, spinning and weaving material mostly grown on slave plantations in the United States. The late Georgian age was more transformative for English towns than any other period.’

Steven points out that in ‘1774 Preston had hardly grown beyond its medieval boundaries. Ten minutes’ walk from the marketplace in any direction would have taken one into open country’. Whereas in ‘1844 Preston’s population had multiplied nine times since 1774’.

I became involved in the project when Steven emailed me last year asking for permission to reproduce the 1774 map, which I had drawn for my website, in his new book, and for help in tracing Peter Adams, the former Ordnance Survey cartographer who drew the 1844 map, based on a section of the OS six-inch map of Preston. Steven was already familiar with Preston, where his father had his business. He was born in Blackburn and grew up in Pleasington

For more on the Lang map: https://prestonhistory.com/maps-and-plans/the-1774-plan-of-preston-introduction/

Later in the book, in discussing Richard Arkwright’s contribution to the rapid spread of cotton mills in the late eighteenth century, Steven takes as an example the mill at Roach Bridge, pointing out that, ‘A few were in existing towns, but more were in new locations, governed by the need for water. The mill at Roach Bridge … set up with Arkwright machinery in 1784, is typical of these early years’.

The book is the culmination of the ten years Steven devoted to researching and planning its production. It is a successor, although with a slightly different focus, to John Summerson’s Architecture in Britain, 1530-1830, published in 1945 and remaining in print until 2000.

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