Avenham and Miller Parks: the Victorian pair on the Ribble

The best thing in Preston, and the reason the city's southern edge feels like somewhere else entirely.

Avenham Park and Miller Park are two adjoining Victorian parks on the southern edge of Preston city centre, and almost nobody treats them as two. They occupy the same steep drop from the town ridge to the north bank of the River Ribble, they share paths, and walking from one into the other requires no decision. Together they are the single strongest argument for visiting Preston.

The reason they work is topography. Most municipal parks are flat ground that a corporation could afford; these are a river cliff that could never have been built on. The result is a landscape with real height in it: terraces, flights of steps, long diagonal avenues cut across the slope, and a view over the Ribble valley from the top that no amount of planting could manufacture.

Avenham Park: the older and looser half

Avenham is the eastern and older of the pair, and it is the one that reads as woodland with paths through it, not as designed landscape. Its defining feature is the open grass slope that falls from the Avenham Walk end down towards the river — the slope that, once a year at Easter, becomes the run for the city's egg rolling.

The park also holds the Japanese rock garden, a small enclosed piece of planting that sits oddly and pleasantly inside an otherwise English landscape, and the Belvedere, the raised viewing platform that looks out over the sweep of the river. The old East Lancashire Railway line crossed here, and the tramroad bridge over the Ribble is still the route walkers take to cross to the south bank.

Miller Park: the formal half, laid out by Edward Milner

Miller Park is the western half and it is the designed one. It was laid out by Edward Milner, who had trained under Joseph Paxton, and it shows: balustraded terraces stepping down the slope, a central axis, formal bedding, and a fountain on the lower terrace. Where Avenham is a wood you walk through, Miller is a composition you look at.

The statue of the 14th Earl of Derby stands on the upper terrace, and the park's boundary runs along the railway viaduct that carries the West Coast Main Line across the Ribble — which means trains pass overhead while you are standing in a formal Victorian garden. It is one of the more particular experiences the city offers.

Walking the two parks as one

The useful route is to enter Avenham from the top, at the Avenham Walk end near the city centre, walk down the slope to the river path, follow the Ribble west along the bottom of both parks, and climb back up through Miller's terraces. That takes about an hour at a slow pace and covers everything worth seeing in both.

The river path at the bottom is part of the Guild Wheel, so the parks are also the most pleasant place to join or leave the circuit. Continuing east along the river leads towards the Fishwick woodland; continuing west reaches Preston Dock.

What the parks are used for

Beyond ordinary use, the parks take the city events that need grass and a slope as opposed to paving. Egg rolling at Easter is the fixed one. Music and community events use the flat ground near the pavilion, and larger festival programmes such as Lancashire Encounter have extended down here from the city centre in some editions.

Opening arrangements, event dates and charges are set by the operator and change without notice. The events sheet describes the recurring annual pattern instead.

The tramroad, and why a bridge crosses here

The footbridge over the Ribble at the bottom of Avenham Park is not a park feature. It carries the line of the old Lancaster Canal tramroad, the horse-worked plateway that once linked the two halves of the canal across the river valley, and it is the reason a crossing exists at this exact point. The incline that climbed the north bank is still legible in the ground as you walk up towards Avenham Walk.

That piece of industrial archaeology matters for walking the city, because the bridge is the only pedestrian crossing of the Ribble between the road bridges. Anyone circling the city on the Guild Wheel or heading for the south bank uses it, and it is what makes the two parks a through route, not a dead end.