Businesses and institutions: the sheet that held everything else

A category defined by what it is not, which is why two of its entries have pages of their own and the rest have this one.

Every directory ends up with one category that means "the rest", and this was Preston's. Where the other three sheets each answer a single question — somewhere to spend an afternoon, somewhere to stay, somewhere to drink — this one held business centres, university room bookings, community centres, hotels and pubs with function space, sports clubs and a nature reserve. Nothing connects them except that they did not fit anywhere else.

That makes it the least useful category to browse and the most useful to understand, because the mixture is a fair picture of what a city directory is actually asked for. People do not only look for leisure. They look for a room to hold a meeting in, an organisation to contact, a company they have heard of, a hall for a party. Those queries have nowhere else to go.

The two entries that kept their own pages

Two of this category's entries carry enough search of their own to be worth an entry page, and they are the two that sit oddly here. EKM is an ecommerce software company in the city, and it is the most searched business entry in the whole directory — unusual, because business listings normally attract almost no search. Brockholes is a nature reserve with a floating visitor village, which belongs with the outdoor pages by subject and ended up here by taxonomy.

The pair are a good illustration of why a mixed category is hard to keep. Each one really belongs somewhere else, and each one is here because the directory had three specific sheets and one general one.

Rooms, halls and function space

The largest strand is space for hire, and it comes from four different kinds of owner. There are business centres letting offices and meeting rooms by the hour or the year. There is the university, which lets teaching and conference space outside term and is the biggest single holder of rooms in the city — the study section covers the institution itself. There are hotels with conference and function suites, which overlap with the places to stay sheet. And there are pubs and sports clubs with a function room upstairs or a clubhouse that takes bookings.

For a reader the distinction that matters is not who owns the room but what it is for. A meeting for eight people, a conference for eighty and a party for a hundred and fifty are three different searches, and they are answered by three different kinds of owner in this list. Preston is reasonably well provided at all three sizes, which is a function of the city having a university, a professional quarter and a large pub stock rather than a purpose-built conference trade.

Community centres and institutions

The second strand is buildings run by and for a community: religious and cultural centres, neighbourhood halls, organisations with premises. They are listed as businesses because they hold a building and take bookings, and they behave like the function-space strand from the outside, but the reason they exist is the community rather than the letting. Preston's population makes this strand larger than the city's size would suggest, and the live and work section is the better route to it.

The business entries proper

The rest are companies: a software firm, a business centre, services people search for by name. A city directory is a poor way to find a supplier, and this part of the category was always the weakest, because a business's address is the least interesting thing about it and everything interesting changes. What the strand does record is that Preston's economy is not only retail, the university and public administration — a point the invest section takes up properly.

Why business names age faster than buildings

The same reason as the pubs sheet: nothing about these entries can be verified from what survives of the directory. Business names, ownership and trading status change faster than almost anything else in a city, and a hire venue that has changed hands is worse than no listing at all, because the reader acts on it. The two named entries are named because their identity is unambiguous and their subject is stable.