Living and working in Preston: services, sport and the Games

The resident-facing section: the healthcare geography, the Guild City Games, and what holds still.

This section is the resident-facing half of the site. It carries the two things that hold still: the healthcare geography, and the sporting programme the city runs under the Guild name. Council services — admissions, collections, licensing, planning — are published by the authorities responsible and change at short notice, so the place to read them is there, and the link out is the useful thing a page like this can offer for them.

What is worth carrying is the things that sit between visiting and living: the healthcare geography, and the sporting programme the city runs under the Guild name.

What is here

Healthcare covers where the provision sits, which is a genuinely useful piece of geography in a city whose hospital serves a catchment much wider than itself. The Guild City Games covers the multi-sport programme, which is one of the recurring items in the city's annual calendar.

• Services / 01

  Healthcare in Preston

  Where the hospital and health provision sits.

• Sport / 02

  Preston Guild City Games

  The city's multi-sport programme.

• Study / 03

  Study in Preston

  The university and the city's colleges.

• Economy / 04

  Invest and regeneration

  The City Deal and the key projects.

• Outdoors / 05

  Parks and outdoors

  The green ring, free and open to everyone.

Where the healthcare provision sits

The hospital is the piece of geography most worth carrying, because its catchment is wider than the city and that changes how the place works. A hospital whose catchment is a region is a large employer on a single site, which shows up in the traffic on the roads that reach it and in the housing immediately around it, and it draws specialist services that a city of this population would not otherwise support. For a resident the practical consequence is that the nearest hospital and the nearest routine appointment are often not in the same place, and the second follows the community provision, wherever that sits.

That pattern — a regional institution sitting inside an ordinary city — repeats across Preston. The county offices, the record office and the university all serve beyond the boundary, and each one puts a working population into the centre that does not live in it. It is the same structure the visiting sheets describe from the other side, and it is why the weekday and weekend city feel like different places.

What a page like this can honestly add is geography and continuity: where things are, why they are there, and what recurs annually. That is what the rest of this site does for visitors and it is the same discipline applied to residents.

What the city is for the people in it

Preston is the administrative centre of Lancashire, which is the single fact that explains most of the difference between the city and a town of comparable population. A county's institutions are here — the county offices, the county record office, a Grade I museum and gallery that opened in 1893 — and they employ and serve a catchment several times the city's own.

The second structural fact is the university. Its campus runs into the commercial streets immediately north of the centre with no clear boundary, which puts a large student population into the same shops, streets and transport as everybody else. Cities where the campus sits apart do not get that effect, for better and worse.

Sport, and the park estate behind it

Preston's sporting provision runs from Deepdale at the professional end, through the Guild City Games as the city's multi-sport programme, down to the playing fields in the municipal parks and the public leisure centres in the residential districts.

The park estate is what makes the middle of that possible. It is Victorian in origin and unusually intact, with Moor Park holding the widest flat open ground in the city, and it survived because the land it occupies — the Ribble slope and the old moor — was never worth building on.