Where to ask in Preston: which source answers which question

Which body, operator or institution holds the answer — and therefore which one to ask.

This site is a reference sheet for Preston, Lancashire. That is a stated policy on every page, and it is the reason this page exists: the honest alternative to publishing operational detail badly is to say clearly where it is published well.

What to ask whom

For event dates and programmes, ask the organiser. For council services, planning, licensing and collections, ask the local authority. For museum and gallery programmes, ask the institution. In every one of those cases the source publishes continuously and correctly, and this page could only ever carry a stale copy.

For the sheets themselves — the geography, the history, the way the city is arranged — the pages here are the answer, and the search will find them.

Where to start on this site

Visit for what is here by kind of day. Things to do for the full index by kind of place. Events for the annual cycle. Directory for named venues without trading detail. Journal for the longer pieces, including the economic approach the city is cited for.

Which source answers which question

Most questions about a city divide cleanly by who actually holds the answer, and going to the wrong holder is the commonest waste of time.

Anything historical about Preston belongs to the Harris, which holds the local history collection and the Guild material and is where the documentary record actually is. Anything about the regeneration programme is in the funding agreements and scheme documents behind the key projects, not in a summary of them.

What these sheets are for instead

Putting things in place: where a venue sits in the city, how it relates to the others of its kind, what the ground is like when you get there, and which of the three distance bands it falls into. Those are the parts that stay true, and they are the parts a search engine handles worst.

The bodies that hold the answers

County-level services — schools, social care, highways, the record office and the library service — sit with Lancashire County Council, and the libraries and archives service is the route to anything documentary about the city. City-level services — bins, licensing, planning, parking and the markets themselves — sit with Preston City Council.

For the two institutions this site writes about most, go to the source: the Harris Museum and Art Gallery for opening arrangements and what is currently showing, and Preston North End for fixtures, tickets and anything about Deepdale. Everything else on the sheets names the operator, and the operator is the answer.

Writing to this site

Corrections, additions and anything about the sheets themselves go to [email protected]. A named venue, a date, a street or a spelling that is wrong here is worth reporting, and so is a page that has gone out of date — that is the kind of thing a reader spots long before anyone maintaining a reference sheet does.

What that address cannot answer is the operational half: opening hours, prices, bookings, event dates and whether a business is trading today all sit with the operator or the authority responsible, and the sections above say which one holds which.