Preston-Then and Now. The Changes of Half a Century. No. I.

Preston-Then and Now.
1813-1893.
The Changes of Half a Century.
No. I. 

Central Railway Station, Preston 1880. An Illustration by C.E. Shaw.

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PRESTON-THEN AND NOW: 1813-1893.
THE CHANGES OF HALF A CENTURY.

No. I

Probably no town in England has undergone greater mutations in its general aspects than "Proud Preston" during the past fifty years; and it has occurred to us that some notice of the changes that have taken place within that period would be acceptable to the general public, and interesting to the younger generation of Prestonians. Our aged townspeople may thus be reminded of scenes and events long since forgotten, but now with our help remembered with varied feelings; and our younger fellow citizens may form a good idea of what the old town was like in the days of their grandfathers, and even in the youth of their parents. As most of our statements are made from memory, it is possible that in some cases we may be at fault, but we think in few instances only.

Suppose our Journey commences at Penwortham bridge. The first noticeable novelty is the avenue of lime trees on the river side, now pretty well grown, between the bridge and the Regatta Inn. That embellishment is due to a suggestion made in the Town Council some where in the fifties by the late Alderman George Smith (then the proprietor of the Moor Brook Mills, in Garstang-road), who died in 1868, in his 71st year. All the streets and buildings lying behind River View, in Broadgate, came rapidly into being from fifteen to twenty years ago. Among these is the Bairstow Memorial Chapel; erected in 1869 in memory of the late Mr. John Bairstow, a munificent benefactor of the church, who was a partner in the celebrated firm of Horroekses, Miller, and Co., long before the late Alderman Miller was connected with it. Mr. Bairstow, a native of Halifax, was one of the apprentices of Mr. John Horrocks, the founder of the cotton trade in Preston; and after his retirement from business he occupied many years the house, in Fishergate now known as the North-Western Hotel, drowning "a youth of labour with an age of ease. He died in 1868, aged 90 years. Looking north, from the end of Strand-road, we see the Marsh, once the common of Preston, and the playground of its youth for ages.

But times are altered; trade's unfeeling train Usurp the land.

And now the Marsh is an arid desert, covered with debris from the recent river improvement works. And we are not aware that the Corporation ever proposed or were ever requested to pro-vide for the youth and childhood of that part of the borough a compensatory recreation ground for the loss of the Marsh. The very river in which the old inhabitant of the town bathed and boated and angled is lost to view from this point, having been diverted from its ancient course. Midway of the desert stand the Victoria ware. houses, built in 1845 in anticipation of increased trade on the Ribble, a new quay having been constructed two or three years previously. Nearer, on the right, stand the great aggregation of buildings and chimneys forming the unfortunate Wagon Works, erected in 1861; and the northern extremity of the Marsh is bounded by rows of shops and houses. On the hill above stands Tulketh Hall, once "'bosom'd high in tufted trees," an ancient monastery founded about 770 years ago by a colony of Cistercian monks, who, however, soon left it and founded Furness Abbey. The old monastery is, and has long been, a private dwelling, and now, denuded of all its arboreal beauty, stands in the midst of bricks and mortar and a teeming population. To the right of Tulketh Hall stands St. Walburge's Roman Catholic Church, opened in 1854, and built from the designs of Mr. J. A. Hansom, the inventor of the cab that bears his name. It has one of the most beautiful spires in the country, which was added to the tower in 1867. The total cost of the church was about £50,000. As we ascend Fishergate Hill we find, on the right, the 'West Lancashire Railway Station, opened about ten years ago, and on the left the Ribble Branch Railway, completed in 1846. The mass of houses comprising South Meadow-lane, Beech-street, and the neighbourhood, and the parti-coloured brick houses above West Cliff road are all of quite recent erection. Those parti-coloured houses stand on ground previously cultivated as kitchen gardens, fenced from the road by a stunted and ragged hedge of thorns; and nearly opposite is the road named after the Marquis of Hartington, passing through the fields anciently known as "The Batte." Just above Bow-lane, at the corner of Pitt-street, the County Hall occupies a site on which stood two houses with large gardens, tenanted by Dr. Bowen and one of the Swainson family. The hall, which cost about £58,000, was opened in 1882 by the Earl of Derby. By far the most notable of the changes that have occurred during the past 10 years was the abolition of the dirty and inconvenient old railway station, and the erection of its present handsome and commodious successог, opened in 1880, and said to be the finest through station in England, save one. It is the work of Messrs. Cooper and Tullis, contractors, of this town, and cost nearly a quarter of a million. To effect this great and long desiderated change it was necessary to demolish a row of five or six stucco-fronted houses, on part of whose site now stand Harding and Co.'s tram carriage office and stables in Fishergate. Those old houses took the fancy back to the days when sedan chairs were the only mode of personal conveyance in Preston.. The iron palisades in front of them were provided with the means of extinguishing the torches carried by the link-boys when the occupant of the sedan chair had reached home. 

The extinguisher was in the form of the bell of a trumpet worked in with the iron palisades, and the torch was extinguished by being thrust therein. On the east side of the railway viaduct, and adjoining the Victoria Hotel, stood the original station of the Lancaster and Preston Railway. After its demolition, and when the labourers, were removing the soil beneath in furtherance of the alterations, a terrible accident happened. A steam crane employed in the work suddenly became uncontrollable, either from subsidence of the ground or some other cause, and fell into the excavation among the navvies.

Three or four of the poor fellows were either killed on the spot or were so severely crushed, burned, and scalded, that they died soon afterwards. Before these operations were commenced, a large mansion, with spacious gardens in front and rear, occupied the site of the present approach to the Central Railway Station. It was formerly the residence of the Winstanley family, but soon after the formation of the Rifle Volunteer Regiment in 1850, it became their headquarters, and was so occupied until required by the railway company for the operations under notice. Before this alteration, the approach to the North Union Station was a passage on the west side of the present viaduct. At the top of Butler-street, at the north-west corner, stood & Railway Hotel, and temperance hotel adjoining it, the latter being occupied by a Mr. John Howarth. Butler-street had then, on the right, a continuous line of houses down as far as the old Lancashire and Yorkshire Station; and on the left of the street, the site of the present Railway Hotel was part of a considerable area of waste ground, on which were sometimes pitched Newsome's Circus and other peripatetic devices for amusement. In providing for the erection of the present admirable station, now one of the ornaments of the town, the directors of the railway company were fortunately prevented from making an egregious blunder by the intervention of the Town Council, and the sagacity and indefatigable exertions of Alderman E. Birley and Mr. Garlick. It was the intention of the directors to make the approach to the new station a flight of broad steps leading from Fishergate to the level of the rail-way platform; and their plan involved also a series of hydraulic lifts for the raining of luggage from the platforms to the level of Fishergate, which was to be reached by some subsidiary means of transit. The absurdity and evident inconvenience, and oven danger to travellers of such a plan, if carried out, were energetically protested against by the Council, and Messrs. Birley and Garlick were appointed a deputation to wait upon the directors with a protest against it. They had several interviews with them, at one of which they pro-pounded the present plan of easy gradient for foot and carriage way. After a good deal of demur and delay, the arguments of the deputies prevailed; and it is to their firmness and persuasive powers that the inhabitants of Preston are indebted for the present safe approach to the station, instead of the breakneck absurdity intended to be inflicted upon them by the directors. Just above Butler-street, and on the opposite side of Fishergate, a roughly-paved road led down to a congeries of coal yards and offices, at the terminus of the Preston and Lancaster Canal. A large area of waste ground on each side of that road was, fenced off from Fishergate by a ticketty wooden railing extending from near the corner house, now Wadels Bazaar, to the road in question. Nearly the whole of the ground occupied by the road and the coal yards has been taken up in the formation of that most convenient thoroughfare named Corporation-street, which puts the pedestrian in Fishergate nearer to Fylde. road by at least fifteen or twenty minutes' walk. The extensive range of buildings known as Livesey and Toulmin's cheese warehouse, at the corner of Water-street West, was built about the same time that these great improvements were effected; and some time after the handsome shops at this point of Fishergate and named respectively "Queen's" and "Victoria" Buildings were erected. Under the east end of these buildings runs the present cart road to the goods department of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company. It is on the identical line of the old tramway, which was constructed eighty or ninety years ago to continue the traffic between the Preston and Lancaster Canal and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, at the Summit Tunnel, near Bamber Bridge. Not a vestige of the old tramway is left within the town; but about half a mile up the Long Walk, on the south side of the Tram Bridge over the Ribble, may be seen some of the sleeper stones on which the rails were laid. The wagons were trained up and down the brow at Avenham by means of machinery in an engine-house then standing on or about the spot now occupied by the Belvidere in Avenham Park. The chains attached to the wagon were worked from the engine-house round a horizontal wheel fixed in the upper part of an open shed standing in the centre of the tramway bridge. A drawing of the bridge and shed may be seen in the Free Library. In connection with that engine-house a very sad event happened a few years before its demolition. One Sunday morning some young men saw the head of a dead man sticking out upon the path from the trap-door of a coal-shoot of the engine-house, the face black from congestion, and the eyes starting from their sockets-a horrible sight. It was supposed that during the previous night, and probably in liquor, the men had determined to have a nap in the engine-house, and that when sliding down the shoot, feet foremost, the heavy trap door had fallen, catching him by the neck and killing him instantly. About that time another strange event occurred on the tram-road. An old woman, having walked from Bamber Bridge, obtained from the man in charge of the wagons leave to ride up the brow, and was put into the last wagon of the train. When it had reached near the top of the brow the chain broke, and down went the wagon at a terrific speed. Half way across the bridge it left the rails and broke through the bridge fence, one half of it hanging over the river, which was in flood at the time. The old woman was rescued from her perilous predicament in an almost paralytic state of fright.

PRESTON-THEN AND NOW: 1843-1893.
Date: Saturday, Mar. 4, 1893
Publication: Preston Chronicle 

Gale Primary Sources, British Library Newspapers:

https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/Y3207511465/BNCN?u=lancs&sid=bookmark-BNCN&pg=2&xid=d9b2b590

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