Preston Sports Fest: the city's recurring participation sports event

Participation, not spectating, and part of the same civic sporting strand as the Guild City Games.

Preston Sports Fest is a recurring participation sports event in the city: taster sessions, club showcases and open activity aimed at getting residents into sport, with spectating beside the point. It belongs to the same civic strand as the Guild City Games.

Like the Games it uses the city's existing sporting geography, because Preston has no sports complex — the provision is spread across Moor Park, the district parks and the public leisure sites.

No dates, sports list or entry arrangements are published here. Both are set annually by the organisers, and the events sheet places them in the city's yearly cycle.

What kind of event this is

A recurring multi-sport event needs three things a city has to actually possess: flat open ground in quantity, changing and parking provision near it, and a body willing to organise across several sports at once. Preston has the first two in its municipal park estate, which is why an event of this kind is possible here at all, and the Guild City Games is the wider programme that the same conditions support.

That physical requirement is also why the event sits where it does, well outside the centre. The commercial core of Preston has no space for it; the parks north and south of the centre do, and they are within walking distance of the middle, which is a combination not many cities of this size can offer.

Where it sits in the year

Organisers of recurring events set them annually and announce them close to the day, and a date printed here would be a guess that reads like a fact. What can be relied on is the character: the same activity, in the same part of the city, returning each year.

The other recurring items are on the annual events index, and the programmed festivals — a different kind of thing, with content that changes each time — sit under cultural annual events.

Where the ground is

Moor Park is the obvious candidate for anything needing space: it is the oldest of the municipal parks and holds the widest area of level open ground in the city, north of the centre on the walk out towards Deepdale. The Avenham and Miller system south of the centre offers the opposite — slope, terracing and a river frontage — which suits different activities.

That the two are ten minutes apart on foot, and both within walking distance of the commercial centre, is the unusual part. A multi-sport programme in most cities of this size has to choose between being reachable and having room; Preston's park estate lets it have both.

How it fits the city's sport

The layers run from Deepdale at the professional end — one of the oldest continuously used football grounds anywhere — through the Guild City Games as the city-wide multi-sport programme, down to the playing fields in the parks and the leisure centres in the residential districts.

The live and work sheet sets out how those layers relate for people living here, where the visit sheets cover the rest.