The Preston journal: the business strand and the visit strand

Two collections that were always separate and stay separate, because they are read by different people.

The journal holds the longer pieces on this site, and it runs in two strands that have never overlapped much. One is about Preston's business and civic economy; the other is about visiting the city, eating in it, and the seasonal year.

Keeping them apart is deliberate. A reader looking for community wealth building and a reader looking for where to take a parent for Sunday lunch are not the same reader, and a single undifferentiated blog serves neither.

The two strands

The Preston Guild blog is the business and civic strand. Its most substantial material is on the city's economic strategy — procurement, the living wage, cooperative models — which is the thing Preston is most cited for outside Lancashire.

The visit blog is the other half: seasonal guides, food and drink, and the recurring questions a city gets asked in December and in June. It is the more used of the two.

• Strand / 01

  Preston Guild blog

  Business, procurement and the civic economy.

• Strand / 02

  Visit blog

  Seasonal guides, food and drink, days out.

• Guidelines / 03

  Business blog guidelines

  What the business strand publishes and what it does not.

• Latest / 04

  Business blog index

  The business strand's own index.

How the journal is kept

Both strands are written as reference rather than as news, which is the only way a page can stay true once it is written; the events sheet handles the annual cycle in the same spirit.

Older material that recorded a single past occasion — a company's sponsorship, one edition of a festival — is not kept as a page, because a page about a single past occasion has nothing to tell a reader now.

Why two strands as opposed to one

The two halves of the journal answer different questions and move at different speeds, and folding them together would damage both. The visit strand is seasonal and practical — what to do at a particular time of year, where to take children, how a day in the city can be arranged — and its pieces have a natural shelf life measured in weeks.

The business strand is the opposite. It deals with how Preston is financed, governed and rebuilt, its subject changes over years instead of weeks, and it assumes a reader interested in civic economics and never in a day out. A reader who wants one of these almost never wants the other in the same sitting.

What makes Preston worth a journal

Two things, and neither is size. The Guild comes once every twenty years — last in 2012, next in 2032 — which gives the city a civic rhythm nothing else in England has, and means that for most of any decade Preston is either recovering from one or preparing for the next. And the approach its council took to procurement and local investment from the early 2010s drew national attention to a mid-sized Lancashire city that would not otherwise have had it.

Between them those two supply a long tail of subjects: the City Deal and the schemes it funds, the university as an anchor institution, the twenty-year cycle of the Guild, and the seasonal life of a city with an unusually intact park estate.