Preston's story is written in cotton. The water frame that changed the world was tested in an arch off Church Street. The first total-abstinence pledge was signed at the Cockpit on Stoneygate by seven named working men — a weaver, a tailor, a joiner. The seven-month lockout of workers was led by Mortimer Grimshaw, the Thunderer of Lancashire, and George Cowell, the weaver's son from Mellor — the same dispute that drew Charles Dickens north and gave him Hard Times. The park on the valley slope was dug by cotton workers thrown out of their mills by the American Civil War. The church spire visible across three counties is said to have been raised with the pennies of Irish loom-workers' Sunday collections. The bus station its builder said should give ordinary people the luxury of air travel. These are the spinners, weavers, pledgers, strikers, navvies, dockers and overlookers whose names rarely made it onto the plaques.
Covered MarketThe Victorian market hall at the heart of the city, with its elegant wrought-iron canopy completed in 1875. The market hall and the adjacent covered market formed the main provisioning centre for the working families of Preston — the stalls run by market traders who, like the guild craftsmen whose rolls are read at the Flag Market nearby, made their living in the open civic economy of the town.
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Preston BusBus station in Preston, Lancashire, England
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Cotton Court Business CentreThe 1851 iron-and-wire mill on Church Street now known as Cotton Court — a surviving fragment of the Horrockses cotton empire that once dominated central Preston. John Horrocks founded the Yellow Factory in 1791 from a back court off Turks Head Court. By the 1880s Horrockses, Crewdson and Co ran 150,000 spindles, 3,100 looms and employed 3,000 workers. The factory and its locked gates were the trigger for the 1853-54 lockout.
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Arkwright HouseThe Georgian brick house at the end of Stoneygate where Richard Arkwright lodged with the headmaster of Preston Grammar School in 1768 and worked in secrecy with clockmaker John Kay and reed-maker Thomas Highs on the machine that became the water frame. Arkwright was born in Preston in 1732, trained as a barber and wig-maker, and the spinning frame he developed here — patented in 1769, first factory-built at Cromford in 1771 — changed the cotton industry irrevocably. Grade II* listed, now used by Age Concern Central Lancashire.
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Preston MinsterThe medieval parish church of Preston — and a stone's throw from the site of the old Cockpit on Stoneygate where, according to tradition, on 1 September 1832, Joseph Livesey — a weaver turned cheesemonger, born in a flooded cellar in Walton-le-Dale — called a meeting and signed the first total abstinence pledge with six others: John Gratix, Edward Dickinson, John Broadbelt, John Smith, David Anderton and John King. The seven named men of the Preston Pledge founded the modern temperance movement from this spot.
