The Flower Bowl: the cinema and leisure complex at Barton near Preston

Not a cinema with extras but a leisure complex with a cinema in it, and the most distinctive venue in this directory.

The Flower Bowl is an entertainment complex at Barton, north of Preston, on the A6 corridor at the Barton Grange site. It holds a cinema alongside other indoor leisure under one roof, which is what distinguishes it from the city centre multiplexes.

Its position matters: Barton is out of the city on the road towards Garstang, so this is a drive, never a walk, and it serves the rural catchment north of Preston as much as the city itself. Barton Grange Hotel is on the same corridor.

The Flower Bowl cinema is the part most visitors come for, and the Flower Bowl entertainment centre around it holds the rest of the leisure under the same roof.

Of the four cinemas in this directory it is the one people travel to deliberately, and not the one they end up at, and the complex format is the reason.

Where the Preston cinemas are, and why this one is not among them

An entertainment complex is a different business from a cinema, and the site says so. Open ground beyond the built edge gives the format what no urban site can: room for several unrelated attractions under one management, parking in proportion to all of them at once, and a catchment drawn by car from three or four towns rather than one city. The screens are one component of that, and the drive is not a drawback to be tolerated but the thing the model is built on.

Barton is the out-of-town complex, on the A6 north of the city near Barton Grange. Combining several leisure formats on one site is a newer model than the multiplex and it needs open ground, which is why it is out here, well clear of the centre. The A6 position is the same logic as the northern hotels: the road network does the work that a central location would otherwise have to.

Getting there from Preston, and what it is near

This is a drive of five or six miles up the A6 from the city. The advantage of the position is that it sits between Preston and open country: the lanes east of Barton climb towards Beacon Fell, and the A6 continues north to Garstang.

For a film without the drive, the two city multiplexes are Vue and Odeon.

What a leisure complex at Barton does that a multiplex cannot

The Flower Bowl cinema is the anchor, but the reason the complex draws from a radius the city-centre screens do not reach is that it answers a longer question. A multiplex sells two hours; a complex with bowling, food and a cinema under one roof sells an afternoon, and an afternoon is what justifies a twenty-minute drive from the villages north and east of Preston. That is also why it sits at Barton rather than in the city: the format needs floorspace and parking at the door, and the A6 corridor has both.

The trade-off is the one every out-of-town leisure site makes. It is unreachable without a car for most of its catchment, which fixes its audience as households rather than the student and city-centre trade the central multiplex takes. The two are not competitors so much as different products sold to different people on different days of the week. A leisure complex of that kind only works where land is cheap enough to give every format its own floor, which is the second reason this one is not in the city.

Barton itself is the other half of the explanation. The Flower Bowl entertainment centre shares the corridor with the Barton Grange garden centre and a hotel, and that cluster is why a village on the A6 carries more visitor traffic than its size suggests: the Barton Grange site is a destination in its own right, and the entertainment centre inherited its catchment.

What is nearby

Barton is on the A6 north of the city, the road that carried traffic to Lancaster and Scotland before the motorway took it. Barton Grange is on the same stretch, and east of the road the lanes climb quickly towards Beacon Fell and the Bowland fringe.

North the A6 continues to Garstang, a market town with the Lancaster Canal running through it. For a film without the drive, the two city multiplexes are Vue and Odeon.