Capitol Centre: the retail park at Walton le Dale, south of Preston

The southern half of Preston's out-of-centre retail, on the far side of the Ribble and on the road everyone uses to get into the city.

Capitol Centre is a retail park at Walton le Dale, on the south side of the River Ribble from Preston city centre. It is the southern counterpart to Deepdale Shopping Park, and between them the two cover the main northern and southern road approaches to the city.

Its position is the whole explanation for it. Walton le Dale sits where the roads from the south and east converge on the Ribble crossing, so a retail park there catches traffic heading into Preston before it reaches the centre. That is a deliberate commercial logic, not an accident of available land.

What is there

The format is the standard out of centre one: large single storey units in terraces, surface parking, national multiples, and vehicle access assumed. The mix leans towards bulky goods and household retail, with little fashion, which is the usual division between a southern and a northern retail park in a city of this size.

Retail park occupancy changes and the operator publishes the current list; a page repeating an old one is a liability, and no kind of service.

Walton le Dale, and the Ribble crossing

Walton le Dale is a separate settlement, and no Preston suburb, on the south bank opposite the city. Historically it mattered because of the crossing: this is where the road from the south met the river, and the crossing point decided the geography of everything around it.

That history is why Preston Dock is downstream and the Victorian parks are on the north bank opposite. The whole southern edge of the city is organised around the fact that the Ribble had to be crossed here.

Getting there

Capitol Centre is designed around car access and is not walkable from the city centre. The local bus network serves it; travel covers the connections and parking covers the centre.

For anyone on foot the useful fact is different: the river path along the south bank runs from near here back towards the city, and the Guild Wheel crosses the Ribble on the old tramroad bridge at the bottom of Avenham Park. The retail park and the best walk in Preston are closer together than the road network suggests.

Where it fits in the city's retail picture

Preston's shopping splits four ways: the markets, the Fishergate high street and its centres, the independent streets behind it, and the two out of centre parks. The parks carry the volume; the first three carry the interest.

A visitor should treat Capitol Centre as infrastructure, never a destination. It is where you go if you need something specific from a large multiple, and nowhere near the top of a list of things to do in the city.

The regeneration argument

The existence of two large out of centre parks is the background to everything under invest. A city centre that has lost the convenience argument has to offer something the retail parks cannot, which in Preston's case means the market site, the heritage fabric and the public space.

Whether that works is a longer question than this sheet can answer. What is clear is that the markets quarter is a response to Capitol Centre and Deepdale, and no unrelated improvement scheme.

The name

The Capitol name comes from a cinema that stood in the area, and from nothing civic, which is a common pattern for retail parks built on the sites of earlier leisure buildings. It is worth knowing only because it explains a name that otherwise reads oddly for a location on the edge of a Lancashire town.

The same is true of a good deal of Preston's edge development: the names are inherited from what was demolished, and they are the only surviving trace of it.

For the built heritage that did survive, the heritage and sights index is the place to look; almost all of it is in the centre or along the river, and none on the approach roads.