Miller Arcade: Preston's Grade II listed Victorian arcade

The best piece of Victorian commercial architecture in the city, and the one building most visitors walk past without going in.

Miller Arcade stands at the Church Street end of Preston city centre, immediately east of the Flag Market and next to the markets. It was built in the 1890s, it is Grade II listed, and it is the finest surviving piece of Victorian commercial architecture in the city.

It is also the building most people miss. From the outside it reads as a large ornate block on a busy corner; the arcade itself runs through the middle of it, and unless you know that, there is nothing to tell you the interior is the point.

The building: terracotta outside, tile inside

The exterior is faced in moulded terracotta, the material of choice for confident late Victorian commercial buildings in the north west, with turrets, gables and a great deal of modelled detail at the upper levels. Almost nobody looks up at it, which is the usual fate of a building at street level on a busy junction.

The interior is glazed brick and tile, top lit through the roof, running as a cross of passages through the block. The tilework is the reason the arcade is listed at Grade II and the reason it is worth the two minutes it takes to walk through: very few English arcades of this date survive with their surfaces intact.

What an arcade was for

A Victorian shopping arcade solved a specific problem: it put small shop units under cover, on a route that cut through a block, so that a shopper could pass between two streets without weather and without traffic. It was the shopping centre before the shopping centre, and it worked because the units were small and the rents were low.

That is also why arcades struggled in the twentieth century. Small units suit independent trade and not multiples, so as retail consolidated the arcades emptied while the department stores filled — and later the covered centres, St George’s among them, took the floorplates the multiples had come to require. Miller Arcade's survival is partly luck and partly the listing.

What it holds now

The units are small, so the trade in them is independent: services, specialist retail, food and drink. That mix changes, and a tenancy list in a small arcade is out of date within a season.

What is stable is the building and the route through it. If you want the current trade, walk in; it takes two minutes end to end and you will see everything.

Where it sits, and what to combine it with

Miller Arcade is two minutes from the markets, three from the Harris and five from Fishergate. The natural sequence is Harris, Flag Market, markets, arcade, and out along Church Street.

It is also a stop on the blue plaque heritage walk, which uses the Victorian commercial buildings on Church Street as its eastern leg. The independent retail sheet covers the smaller shops in the streets around it.

The arcade and the markets quarter

Miller Arcade sits at the western end of the area the city has been regenerating around the market site, set out on the markets quarter sheet. That places the oldest surviving commercial building in the quarter directly against its newest.

The contrast is the most legible thing about Preston's centre: a 1890s tiled arcade, a 1870s cast iron market canopy and a 2018 market hall within three minutes of each other, all still doing the same job.

The corner it stands on

The arcade occupies an island site at one of the busiest junctions in the city, where Church Street, Lancaster Road and the approach to the markets meet. That position is why the building is as elaborate as it is: a commercial block on a corner in the 1890s was advertising, and the terracotta was the advertisement.

It also explains the shape of the interior. The passages run diagonally through the block as opposed to straight, because they had to connect the doors on three different street frontages. Walking it feels slightly disorienting for that reason, and the disorientation is original.

For anyone photographing the city centre, the corner is the best single viewpoint on Church Street, and the upper storeys read far better from the opposite pavement than from directly beneath.