Preston railway station: the main line interchange question

The most important piece of infrastructure in the city and the one the regeneration programme did not touch.

Preston station sits on the West Coast Main Line at the western edge of the city centre and it is a major interchange: direct services to London, Birmingham, Manchester, Lancaster, Glasgow and Edinburgh, plus the junction where the Fylde coast and East Lancashire lines meet that route. It handles considerably more people than a city of Preston's size generates, most of them changing trains and never leaving the platforms.

It is on the future-projects list because its redevelopment has been discussed for a very long time without resolution, and because the City Deal — which reshaped the road network around the city — did not address it. That omission is the clearest illustration of what the City Deal mechanism was and was not for.

Why the station matters more than its size suggests

Two reasons. First, interchange traffic: a junction station's importance is set by the network, and never by the town, and Preston's position on the main line where the Lancashire branches join makes it structurally significant to the whole north west. Second, it is the arrival point that forms every rail visitor's first impression of the city, and it opens directly onto Fishergate.

That second point is the one a city guide has to care about. A visitor's judgement of Preston is largely formed in the first ten minutes, and those ten minutes are the station and the western end of the high street.

Why nothing has happened

Because a main line station is not a local project. Its ownership, funding and delivery sit with the rail industry and national government, well outside the city, its rebuilding has to be phased around a route that cannot close, and its cost is of a different order from anything in the local programme. A City Deal underwritten against local development receipts was never going to deliver it.

That is not a criticism of anyone's ambition. It is a statement about which levers a city actually holds, and it is the honest answer to why the most obviously needed piece of infrastructure in Preston is also the one least likely to move.

What the city can do around it

The public realm between the station and the centre is within local control, and that is where effort has gone: the Fishergate remodelling prioritised pedestrians over through traffic along exactly that route. It does not fix the station but it improves the walk out of it, which is the part a visitor experiences.

The travel sheet sets out what the station connects to, and the invest index sets out the rest of the programme.

Proposals floated over decades, none delivered

Station redevelopment proposals of various scales have been floated over decades and none has been delivered; recording any of them as the current plan would be asserting something with a poor record of remaining true.

What is stable is the station's position on the network, why it matters, and why it remains as it is.

The station and the shape of the city

The station's position also explains a good deal about how Preston is arranged. It sits at the south western corner of the centre, which is why Fishergate runs east from it as the principal street and why the retail weight of the centre is at that end. The market and the civic square are at the other end, which is the older centre of gravity.

So the city has two centres about ten minutes apart: a Victorian and modern commercial one at the station end, and a medieval and civic one at the market end. Knowing that makes the centre far easier to read on a first visit, and it is set out on the visit sheet.