The UCLan masterplan: the university rebuild in Preston

The largest single construction programme in the centre, and the one that changed how people walk through the northern half of the city.

The University of Central Lancashire's masterplan is the largest single construction programme in Preston city centre. It covers the university's campus immediately north of the commercial core, and it has been delivered in phases over a number of years.

For a visitor it matters less as architecture than as geography: the campus sits between the city centre and Moor Park, so the masterplan reshaped the pedestrian route between the two, more than once.

What UCLan is

The University of Central Lancashire is one of the larger UK universities by student numbers and it traces its origin to an institution founded in Preston in 1828 for the diffusion of useful knowledge. That is a genuinely long lineage for a modern university and it is a real part of the city's history.

Its scale is the significant fact for the city. A university of this size in a city of Preston's size means the student population is a substantial share of the centre's users, and that shows in the retail, the food and drink trade and the evening economy.

What the masterplan did

The programme replaced and consolidated ageing campus buildings, added new teaching and research space, and — the part that matters most to non-students — created a public square and improved the streets running through the campus.

Before it, the campus was a collection of buildings that the city walked around. The intent of the masterplan was a campus the city walks through, with public space, not service yards facing the streets.

Why the public realm was the point

A university campus adjoining a city centre is either a barrier or a connector, and the difference is almost entirely about ground-floor treatment and route legibility. Preston's campus was, for a long time, a barrier: it interrupted the walk north from the centre towards Moor Park.

Opening it up changed the pedestrian geography of the northern half of the centre. It is the single most useful thing the programme did for people who are not students, and it is why a city reference sheet carries it at all.

The effect on the surrounding streets

The streets between the campus and Fishergate carry the trade that a large student population generates, and the independent food and drink concentration on that side of the centre is largely explained by it.

Friargate in particular is a street whose character is set by the campus at its northern end. Anyone trying to understand why one part of Preston's centre is busy in the evening and another is not should start there.

Where it sits in the programme

The masterplan runs alongside instead of inside the City Deal: a university's capital programme is its own, funded through its own borrowing and reserves, even where the public realm elements coordinate with city schemes.

Together with the markets quarter it accounts for most of the change in the northern half of Preston city centre over the past decade. The invest index sets out the rest.

The 1828 lineage, and why it is worth knowing

The institution founded in Preston in 1828 was one of a family of mechanics' institutes and similar bodies set up across the industrial north to give working people access to technical and scientific education. Most did not survive as degree-awarding institutions; this one did.

That is a better story than a modern university usually has, and it connects directly to the civic tradition the rest of this site describes — the Harris, opened in 1893 with a library inside it, belongs to exactly the same impulse.

A capital programme reorders itself

A multi-phase capital programme changes its sequence, and a page repeating a phase schedule from a previous year would be wrong about the thing readers most want to know.

The university publishes its own programme. This page records what the masterplan is for and what it changed about walking through the city.