A tale of two Prestons

In 1841, the Preston historian and printer Peter Whittle published a directory for Preston that includes a section listing the town’s gentry and their addresses (pictured below). Those addresses clearly map the geographical social division that was growing in the town during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, putting a gulf between the workers in the north and east and the well-to-do in the south-west, and creating two separate and very different communities.

Whittle gives no explanation of how he decided who to include in his list of 136 gentry. Some local gentry may be missing from the list, others who would not normally qualify as gentry, he may have included to flatter. Whatever criteria he used, the list provides a useful yardstick to plot where the better-off inhabitants of Preston chose to live.

I started digitising Whittle’s directory recently as part of a dataset I am building to investigate the vast working-class estates that were appearing in the same period to the north and the east of the town, and I thought the gentry section might be of general interest.

By the time the directory was published, the Tomlinson brothers had already bought hundreds of acres of virtual wasteland to the north of the town centre and were transforming them into what was to become Plungington. By 1841, they had already sold off building plots for getting on for five hundred terraced houses, built as through-lobby houses to crowd more properties to the acre.

The addresses in Whittle’s gentry list show that houses spreading at the same time to the south-west of the town were the homes of those very gentry that Whittle had listed. They were much more spacious and well-appointed than the two-up, two-down terraced properties on the other side of town. Preston was splitting into its two distinct communities.

This divide became more entrenched as the century progressed. The Tomlinsons pushed their Plungington estate beyond the Moor Brook, eventually stretching to the present Blackpool Road. They were joined as property developers by the Pedder family, who sold off their Maudland estate for working-class housing, and the Lutwidges, who opened up the vast Ribbleton estate for hundreds of terraced houses stretching east from Deepdale Road. These were all almost exclusively houses for the working class.

The second half of the century saw the completion of Winckley Square and its surrounding streets: providing middle-class housing for people leading lives a world away from those of the inhabitants of the terraced houses.

If I come across anything more of general interest as I continue to build the working-class districts dataset, I’ll post here.

Where the gentry lived

I entered the names and addresses of the gentry in the directory, along with the names and addresses of the town’s Anglican clergy found elsewhere in the directory, into a spatial database to produce the heat map pictured. This shows where the wealthiest inhabitants of Preston were choosing to live in 1841, and the districts they were shunning. The deeper the red, the more the streets were favoured by the gentry.

It is clear that Fishergate and Ribblesdale Place were the most highly favoured, along with the new houses in Winckley Square, Winckley Street and Chapel Street, and to the west new houses on Fishergate Hill, Spring Bank, Stanley Terrace, Charles Street and West Cliff. Very few chose to live north of Fishergate: John Walton in Friargate, a Miss Arrowsmith in the Market Place, George Clarkson in North Road and the Rev Thomas Farish at Maudland Bank.

A number of gentry were still making their homes in Church Street, and a small number of substantial houses had been built in Grimshaw Street, where two from the gentry list were living.

In what were to become the working-class districts of the town, the only gentry to be found were the Anglican clergy like Mr Farish, the minister at St Peter’s. The minister of St Mary’s lived on Salmon Street, with the minister of Trinity Church a close neighbour at Common Bank, although he was quite a way from his flock.

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The ‘gentry’ streets, with the number of gentry living in each:

Fishergate 21
Ribblesdale Place 17
Chapel Street 7
Avenham Lane 7
Fishergate Hill 6
Church Street 6
Winckley Square 6
Avenham Road 3
Winckley Street 3
Stanley Terrace 3
Grimshaw Street 2
Bushell Place 2
Spring Bank 2
Bow Lane 2
Walton Parade 2
Cross Street 2

The other addresses on the map had a single ‘gentry’ entry. A further 36 of those listed lived in the surrounding districts, including two who were living in new houses across from Moor Park on the present Garstang Road.