The markets quarter: Preston's regeneration around the markets

The one piece of Preston's regeneration that is built around something the city already had.

The markets quarter is the city-centre regeneration area around Preston's market site, on the northern side of the centre between the Flag Market and the Ringway. It covers the Market Hall, the Victorian covered market ground, and the leisure and cinema development built alongside them.

It is the most interesting part of Preston's regeneration programme because it is the only part built around an asset the city already had. Everywhere else the strategy is to add something; here it is to make the market work harder.

What the quarter contains

Three things, of three different centuries. The cast iron and glass market canopy from the 1870s, which shelters the outdoor trading ground. The Preston Market Hall, which opened in 2018 as an enclosed building with fixed units. And the newer cinema and leisure development that occupies the rest of the site.

Around them are Earl Street, the Flag Market and the older commercial fabric running east towards Miller Arcade. That gives the quarter a range of building dates within three minutes' walk that nowhere else in Preston matches.

Why the market was the right anchor

Because it is the thing the city is most searched for and the thing the retail parks cannot replicate. Deepdale and Capitol Centre can carry every multiple in the country; neither can carry a Victorian covered market.

A centre that has lost comparison retail has to compete on what is not portable, and a market under a listed canopy is about as unportable as urban assets get. That is the strategic logic, and it is sounder than most city centre regeneration arguments.

The leisure half

The cinema and leisure element is the part that draws evening trade, which a market alone does not. The intent is that the two use the same site at different hours: market by day, cinema and food in the evening, with the parking and the public space shared.

Whether that works depends on things a page cannot assess, and no claim is made either way. What is observable is that the site now has two distinct busy periods where it had one.

The heritage question

Building modern leisure against a Victorian market canopy is a real design problem and it divides opinion locally. The canopy is a structure of considerable quality, it is best read from underneath and along its length, and anything built close to it competes for that reading.

The alternative — a market ground surrounded by vacancy — is worse, and that is the choice that was actually available. It is worth saying plainly; pretending the trade-off did not exist would be the easier line.

Where it sits in the programme

The quarter sits under the wider City Deal framework and alongside the university masterplan to the north. Between them those two cover most of the northern half of the city centre.

The invest index sets out the rest, and the journal's business strand covers the procurement argument that runs alongside the physical programme.

Phasing changes, and tenants change faster

Regeneration phasing changes, and the leisure tenants of any such development change faster than the buildings do.

The market operator, the council and the developers publish their own. This page records what the quarter is and why the market was chosen as its anchor.

Reading the canopy while you are there

If you visit one thing in the quarter, look up in the covered market. The canopy is iron columns, latticed trusses and glazed span thrown over open ground, built to shelter stalls that already traded there, with no building to enclose, and that is why it reads as a roof standing on its own legs.

It is the best industrial structure in Preston and the least noticed, because it works. Nobody photographs a roof that is doing its job.

How the quarter connects east and west

The quarter is the middle of a chain; it was never a self-contained site. West is the Flag Market and the Harris; east is Miller Arcade and Church Street. Walking the whole chain takes ten minutes and covers the 1870s, the 1890s, 1893 and 2018.

That density is the actual asset, more than any single building in it. Very few English cities of this size can show four distinct periods of confident public building within a ten minute walk, and the regeneration is at its best where it makes that walk easier, and weakest where it only adds floorspace.