Fishergate: Preston's main shopping street

The street every rail arrival walks up, and the one that decides what visitors think of the city in the first five minutes.

Fishergate runs east to west through the middle of Preston, from the Flag Market down towards the railway station, and it is the city's main shopping street. It carries the national multiples, the entrances to both city centre shopping centres, and most of the pedestrian traffic in the centre.

It is also the street that forms first impressions, because a rail arrival comes out of the station at its western end and walks up it to reach everything else. That gives Fishergate a disproportionate effect on how the city is judged, and it is worth saying plainly that it is not the most interesting part of Preston.

Where the street runs and what is on it

From the station the street climbs gently east, past the shopping centre entrances, to the open ground of the Flag Market and the Harris. Beyond that it continues as Church Street towards Miller Arcade and the markets.

The retail on Fishergate itself is what a British high street of this size now carries: the surviving multiples, banks and phone shops at the western end, and a thinner mix towards the Flag Market. The two shopping centres take the larger units off it as opposed to fronting it.

The remodelling, and what it changed

Fishergate was remodelled to prioritise people over through traffic, in the pattern that most English city centres adopted: narrowed carriageway, widened footways, level surfaces, reduced kerb lines and controlled vehicle access. The intent was to make the street a place as opposed to a route.

The effect is real but partial. The street reads far better on foot than it did, and the level surfaces make the walk from the station genuinely easier. What a remodelling cannot fix is the retail mix, and the vacancy that arrived with out of centre shopping is still visible.

The shopping centres

Two shopping centres open off Fishergate, St George’s and the Fishergate shopping centre, and between them they hold most of the enclosed retail floorspace in the city centre. They function as they do everywhere: the anchors are national names, the mall units are the multiples, and the entrances as opposed to the frontages are what you see from the street. A third covered block, St John's, sits at the market end of the centre on Lancaster Road and trades at the other end of the market entirely.

Shopping centre tenancy lists turn over continuously and a static page repeating one is out of date within a season; it would also be the least useful thing a reference sheet could carry, because the centres publish their own.

Fishergate against the rest of Preston's shopping

The important thing to understand is that Fishergate is one of four kinds of shopping in the city and not the best of them. The markets are more distinctive, Miller Arcade is architecturally better, and the independent retail streets behind the high street carry the smaller shops.

Most of the actual retail volume, meanwhile, has gone out of the centre entirely, to Deepdale Shopping Park and Capitol Centre. Fishergate is the high street of a city whose shopping has largely moved elsewhere, which is the ordinary condition of an English high street and not a Preston peculiarity.

Arriving on Fishergate

Preston station sits at the western end, on the West Coast Main Line, so Fishergate is the natural walking route in from a train. The bus station is on the northern side of the centre, reached from the Flag Market end. Parking and travel cover the arrival options.

If you have half an hour in Preston between trains, the honest advice is to walk up Fishergate to the Flag Market, look at the Harris, and turn round. If you have longer, keep going: everything better is east and south of that point.

The name, and the street before the shops

Fishergate is named for the fish trade, and the name is older than any building on it. It was the western approach to the medieval town, running out towards the crossing of the Ribble, and it became the principal street because that is where the traffic came from, not because anyone planned it.

Almost nothing medieval survives above ground. What is there is a nineteenth and twentieth century commercial street on a medieval line, which is why the street bends where it does and why its plot widths are narrower at the eastern end.

The one place the older pattern is still legible is in the side streets running off it. They are short, they run at odd angles, and several of them end in a yard as opposed to another street — the remains of burgage plots running back from the frontage.