St George's Shopping Centre: the covered block behind Fishergate

One of the two covered centres that open off Preston's high street, described by what it is and where it stands.

St George's Shopping Centre is one of the two covered centres that open off Fishergate, Preston's high street. It is a single roofed block set behind the street frontage and reached through entrances in it, which is the standard arrangement for a centre inserted into an existing Victorian high street, and never built on cleared ground.

That arrangement is the most useful thing to understand about it, because it explains what you see from the street. The frontage on Fishergate stays a run of separate shopfronts; the large floorplate sits behind them, invisible from the pavement until you are level with an entrance. People who have walked past it without noticing it are not being unobservant — it is designed that way.

What a covered centre does to a street pattern

A high street is a run of separately owned units, each with its own frontage and its own rent. A covered centre is one owner, one roof and one set of terms, and it can therefore offer the large floorplates that a chain requires and a nineteenth century unit cannot provide. Inserting one into an existing street pulls the larger operators off the street and into the block.

The visible consequence is the one Preston shows clearly: the high street keeps the smaller units and the centres take the larger ones. That is why the character of Fishergate and the character of the centres differ, and why a visitor who wants independent retail should look at neither.

Where it sits, and what is within a few minutes

The centre sits on the northern side of the high street, which puts the market site and its 1870s cast iron canopy a short walk to the north east, and Miller Arcade — the Grade II listed Victorian arcade, and the exact opposite proposition — a few hundred metres east.

Those three within a few minutes of each other are the whole argument for shopping in Preston on foot: a covered centre, a Victorian arcade and an open market ground are three different retail formats from three different centuries, and no other city of this size puts them that close together.

Independent retail is somewhere else

The independent trade sits on the small streets running south of the high street, in nineteenth century units at rents an owner-operator can carry. The independent retail sheet covers that side. Anyone whose reason for coming into Preston is the independents should start there and treat the centres as somewhere to shelter.

For the out-of-centre retail parks, which are a different proposition again and need a car, the Capitol Centre and Deepdale sheets describe what is on each corridor.

The name, and the two centres people confuse

Preston has two covered centres opening off the same high street, which is one more than most cities this size carry, and the search data shows people reaching for one and meaning the other. The distinguishing fact is position, not size: one opens off the northern side of Fishergate, the other off the southern, and they face each other across the street with the frontage between them.

The apostrophe in the name is the other thing that separates a search from its answer. It is written St George's, with the apostrophe, and searches that drop it are the ones that return the centre in Leicester or the one in Preston, Connecticut.

Occupancy changes; the building does not

Occupancy in a covered centre changes continually, the operator publishes the current list, and a page repeating an old one is a liability, and no service at all. What holds true for years is the building, the position and the format, and that is what this sheet records.

The same applies to opening hours. They are set by the centre and they differ from the high street around it and from the market site nearby, so there is one reliable source for them and it is not this page.