Preston's former post office: the city-centre conversion site

A good building looking for a use, which is the commonest condition of a landmark in an English city centre.

The former General Post Office in Preston is a substantial early twentieth century civic building in the city centre, of the confident classical type that the Post Office built across Britain when it was one of the largest institutions in the country. It stopped being a post office, as almost all of them did, and it has since been the subject of conversion proposals — the best known of them a hotel under the Shankly Hotel brand.

Conversion schemes of this kind change hands, stall, are re-costed and are revived, and a reference page asserting that a building is currently being converted — or that it is not — is making a claim it cannot stand behind. What is verifiable is the building and the history of intent around it.

Why post office buildings are difficult

A large sorting and counter building is one of the hardest civic structures to reuse. The plan is organised around a public hall at the front and a working volume behind it, the floor loadings and window arrangements suit neither offices nor flats without substantial intervention, and the whole thing is usually too good to demolish and too awkward to convert cheaply.

That combination is why so many of them sit empty for years, in Preston as everywhere. It is a building-type problem, and in no way a Preston one, and understanding that is more useful than tracking any individual scheme.

Where it sits in the programme

It belongs with the city living strand in intent, even though a hotel is not housing: the underlying argument is the same one, which is that a city centre that has lost comparison retail needs people in it outside shopping hours. A hotel does that with visitors, where housing does it with residents.

The invest sheet sets out that reasoning, and the markets quarter is the same argument applied to the market site.

Reading it from the street

Whatever happens to it, the building is worth looking at, and it belongs on the same city centre walk as the other landmarks. The Post Office built to a standard of ambition that its successors did not, and the frontages are the evidence: heavy stonework, a strong cornice line and a public entrance treated as an event.

The heritage and sights index carries the rest of the centre's buildings, and the blue plaque walk passes this part of the city.

Everything about a scheme this size has changed at least once

Every one of those has changed at least once since the building came empty, which is why the developer and the planning register are the places to read them.

For the current position, the developer, the operator and the planning register are the sources.

What the Post Office built, and why

Between the late nineteenth century and the mid twentieth, the Post Office was one of the largest employers and largest builders in Britain, and it built to a civic standard because it understood itself as a public institution, not a business. The result is a stock of substantial, well-made buildings in the middle of almost every British town, put up for an organisation that no longer needs them in that form.

Preston's is a good example of the type. Reading it as part of that national pattern, and not as a local vacancy problem, is the more useful frame, and it explains why the same conversion difficulty appears in dozens of other town centres at the same time.