The University of Central Lancashire: UCLan and its Preston campus

A modern university with one of the oldest lineages in the sector, on a campus that reshaped the northern half of the city centre.

The University of Central Lancashire is one of the larger UK universities by student numbers, and its main campus sits immediately north of Preston city centre. It is the single largest institution in the city and the reason Preston functions as a student city as much as a market town.

Its lineage is the genuinely unusual part. UCLan traces its origin to an institution founded in Preston in 1828 for the diffusion of useful knowledge — one of the family of mechanics' institutes and similar bodies established across the industrial north to give working people access to technical and scientific education. Most of those did not survive as degree-awarding institutions. This one did, which makes it one of the oldest such lineages in the sector.

The 1828 impulse, and where else it shows in Preston

That founding purpose connects the university directly to the rest of Preston's civic architecture. The Harris, opened in 1893 with the borough's library inside it, comes from exactly the same impulse: the Victorian conviction that a town should provide the means of self-education to people who could not buy it. The museum and the university are two expressions of one idea, separated by sixty-five years.

It is worth knowing because it changes how the city reads. Preston's public buildings are not there to display civic wealth; they are there to distribute knowledge, and that is a less common motive than it sounds.

The campus

The campus occupies a substantial area between the commercial centre and Moor Park, and it has been rebuilt in phases under the masterplan — the largest single construction programme in Preston city centre. The most important thing the masterplan did for non-students was open the campus streets and create public space, turning a barrier into a route.

Before it, walking north from the centre towards Moor Park meant going around the university. Now it means going through it, which is a material improvement to the pedestrian geography of that half of the city.

What a university this size does to a small city

The effects are concentrated and visible. Friargate and the streets between the campus and Fishergate carry the independent food, drink and evening trade, and they are busy in the evening and quiet in the day — the reverse of the shopping streets. The city's independent coffee sector, which is the strongest part of its food offer, rests on the same combination of cheap small units and a young population.

It also means term dates change the feel of the centre noticeably, which is unusual in a city that is not primarily a university town.

What belongs on the university's own pages

Anything a prospective student needs to decide with is on the university's own pages and nowhere else worth trusting. This sheet is written for the other reader: someone trying to understand why a city of this size has a campus of this size in the middle of it, and what that does to the streets around it.

What it records is what the university is, where its lineage comes from, and what its presence does to the city around it.

Where the university sits in the city's economy

A university of this size is one of Preston's largest employers as well as its largest institution, and that matters for a reason beyond employment. The Preston Model depends on redirecting the procurement spending of large local anchor institutions towards local suppliers, and a university is one of the largest anchors there is. Any serious version of that strategy runs through it.

So the campus is not only a piece of the city's physical fabric; it is a substantial part of the financial argument the city has become known for. The two halves of this site — the invest sheets and the journal's business strand — both lead back here.

Visiting the campus

There is nothing ticketed to visit, but the campus is worth walking through, and possible to walk through, which is what the masterplan was for. It is also the route between the city centre and Moor Park, so anyone walking out to the park or on to Deepdale will cross it anyway.

The public realm and the new square are the parts to look at. Compared with the buildings they replaced they are a straightforward improvement, and they are the clearest example in Preston of a large institution being made permeable where it had been defensive.