Preston's inventions: the spinning frame, the pledge and the tramcar

Three things came out of this city that changed how other places worked, and only one of them is a machine.

A city's inventions are usually listed as objects, and Preston's list reads oddly if you do that: a machine, a word, and a factory. Taken as three ways of changing how work and life were organised, they make more sense together, and the cotton trade is the thread running through all three.

The machine: Arkwright and the spinning frame

Richard Arkwright was born in Preston in 1732, and the machinery associated with him did something more consequential than spin thread faster. It moved spinning out of the household and into a building that needed a power source, a workforce arriving at fixed hours, and capital to construct. The factory as an institution follows from that, and so does most of what the nineteenth century did to northern England.

Preston itself became a cotton town on the back of it, and the wealth that built the Victorian centre — the Harris, the garden squares, the municipal parks — came out of that trade. His own sheet is at Sir Richard Arkwright.

The word: teetotalism

The second export is not an object at all. Preston was the centre of the temperance movement that emerged in the 1830s, and the total-abstinence pledge that distinguished it from mere moderation was formulated here: Joseph Livesey signed it in 1833, and that signature is what the movement dates itself from. The word teetotal itself is attributed to a Preston man speaking at one of those meetings, and it entered general English from this city. The pledge is associated with Joseph Livesey, a Preston weaver turned newspaper proprietor, who argued the case in print for decades; his will provided for a copy of his Malt Liquor Lecture to be delivered to every household in the town, and 20,000 copies were printed for it, each carrying the line “he being dead yet speaketh”.

That matters more than a piece of etymology suggests. Temperance societies built halls, ran savings schemes, published newspapers and organised excursions, and in a factory town they were one of the few institutions working-class people controlled themselves. A good deal of nineteenth-century civic life in the north grew out of that model. Livesey's own case ran through print, and one of his titles was a first in itself: the Preston Temperance Advocate was the first temperance publication published in the United Kingdom. He also founded the Preston Guardian in 1844 with his sons, it became the most influential paper in north Lancashire, and he sold it in 1859.

The works: building the tramcars

The third is industrial, and owes nothing to the intellectual strand. Preston built rolling stock, and the Electric Railway and Tramway Carriage Works Ltd supplied tramcars at the point when electric traction was replacing horses in towns across Britain and beyond. The engineering record for works of that kind is documented in detail off-site.

The same industrial base produced Dick, Kerr & Co, which built railway and tramway equipment in the city — and, incidentally, the works team that became the best-known women's football side in Britain. Industrial Preston and social Preston are not separate stories.

The engineering firsts, which are the ones people mean

Ask what Preston invented and the answers that come back are usually not the spinning frame. They are three pieces of twentieth-century engineering, all from the same company. English Electric built the Canberra here, the jet bomber that took the record for the fastest Atlantic crossing in 1951 at four hours and forty minutes and held more than twenty other world records. The same firm built the Deltic diesel prototype, DP1, at Strand Road in 1955: the most powerful locomotive of its kind anywhere at the time. Aviation runs through the same works: the Felixstowe F3 flying boat was built here, and so was the rear fuselage of Concorde.

The third is the road itself. The Preston Bypass, opened in 1958, was the first stretch of motorway built in Britain, and it is now part of the M6 that runs immediately east of the city — described from the driver's side on the travel sheet. A city that produced a factory system, a bomber, a locomotive and the first motorway inside two centuries is not a place with one industrial story. It also produced the country's first motorway collision, near Preston, about a week after the road opened. Cars came out of the same period and the same industrial base: Bond Cars was a Preston maker, and the name survives on the Bond Bug, the three-wheeler the marque is remembered for.

The people

Beyond Arkwright the city's list of names is short and unusually varied: the animator Nick Park, born here in 1958, and the cricketer Andrew Flintoff, born here in 1977. The famous Prestonians sheet collects them, and the interesting facts sheet covers the smaller items. The sporting names belong in the same list and are covered on the Deepdale sheet: the 1888/89 side that took the first Football League title unbeaten and the FA Cup without conceding, the 26–0 win over Hyde in 1887 that is still the record score in English senior football, and Tom Finney, who was Footballer of the Year twice, in 1954 and 1957.

What the three exports have in common is that none of them stayed here. The factory system, the abstinence pledge and the tramcar all left Preston and were adopted elsewhere, which is the usual fate of a good idea and the reason a city of this size appears so often in other places' histories.

Why a cotton town produced all three

The connection between the machine, the pledge and the tramcar is not thematic, it is economic. A powered factory needs a workforce arriving at fixed hours, and a town that acquires one acquires everything that follows: dense housing built quickly, wages paid weekly in cash, public houses at the end of every street, and a population with no land and no fallback. Each of Preston's three exports is a response to some part of that.

The spinning machinery created the condition. The temperance movement was one answer to what the condition did to the people living inside it — which is why it came with savings schemes and reading rooms, and never only with a pledge. And the rolling-stock works are what a town does with the engineering capacity it built for one industry once that industry has taught a generation to work metal.

What the city kept of it

Not the industries. Cotton went, the tramcar works went, and the temperance halls found other uses. What survived is the built city those trades paid for: the Harris, the garden squares, and a municipal park estate laid out on ground nobody could build on and consequently never lost.

That is the honest version of a city's inventions: the ideas leave and the buildings stay. Preston's list is unusually consequential for a place of this size, and almost none of it is still made here.