Corporation Street: city-centre residential development in Preston

One site in the city living strand, and a marker of the strategy behind the wider programme.

Corporation Street runs on the northern side of Preston city centre, and the site there sits in the city living strand of the regeneration programme: residential development inside the commercial core, well away from the city edge.

The strategic reason is straightforward. A centre that has lost comparison retail to the out-of-centre parks needs a resident population to keep it in use outside shopping hours, and city-centre housing is the standard instrument for that. It is the same argument as the markets quarter approached from the other side.

No costs, unit numbers, phase dates or occupancy status are published here. Development timetables slip and schemes are reshaped, and a page repeating either from a previous year would be wrong about the thing readers most want to know. The invest index sets out the wider programme.

Why residential development in the centre at all

City-centre housing is the part of a regeneration programme that changes how a place works; the look follows later. Preston's commercial core empties in the evening, as most mid-sized British city centres do, because almost nobody lives in it — the population is in the suburbs and the students are on the campus. Residential development inside the core is the only mechanism that alters that.

The constraint is the same one that shapes every scheme in the programme: there is no cleared ground next to the centre. Preston was built once, in a street pattern fixed before any of this was drawn, so residential development here means building on individual sites inside that pattern. Nothing here was drawn as a masterplanned quarter.

Where this sits in the programme

Corporation Street is the entry point to the city-living strand, which is the residential layer of the wider scheme list in the key projects index. The funding framework behind most of the programme is the City Deal, and the districts view is on the key project areas sheet.

No completion date is published here. Dates on schemes of this size move, and a date that has moved is worse than no date because it reads as current when it is not. What this sheet records is what the scheme is and where it stands.

What city-centre housing changes

An occupied city centre behaves differently after six o'clock, and that is the whole argument. Preston's core empties in the evening because almost nobody lives in it: the population is suburban and the students are on the campus immediately north. Evening trade, safety by occupation, and the viability of anything that is not a daytime shop all follow from residents, and only secondarily from footfall.

The key projects programme approaches that from several directions at once — residential on individual sites, changes of use for buildings the retail economy no longer needs, and the transport question at the railway station. Housing is the slowest of those to show an effect and the one that lasts longest.