Grange Park: the suburban park in eastern Preston

Park on one side of the boundary, managed habitat on the other, and the clearest lesson in the difference the city offers.

Grange Park serves the Grange district on the eastern edge of Preston. Like Ribbleton Park it is a district recreation park, never a destination, and its interest lies in what it sits against: the Grange Valley nature reserve runs along one side of it.

That juxtaposition is the reason to walk here. Very few places let you step from mown recreation grass into managed woodland habitat in a single stride, and the contrast makes both easier to understand.

The park

Open grass with pitches, a playground, perimeter paths and boundary planting. The ground is gently sloping, where Ribbleton is level, which distinguishes the two, and the fall is towards the valley on its eastern side.

There is no ornamental element. The park was laid out to serve housing and it does that; the design ambition was provision, and never composition.

The valley boundary

The eastern edge of the park is the top of the Grange Valley, and the reserve begins there. Mowing stops, the path surface changes, deadwood is left standing and the tree cover closes over. The transition is abrupt because the management regimes differ, and not because the land does.

For anyone trying to understand why Preston's nature reserves look and feel the way they do, this boundary is the best twenty metres in the city.

The Grange district

Grange is one of the post war eastern suburbs, built out along the roads towards Longridge and the Ribble valley. It is wholly residential, and the park and the valley together are its open space.

That is a common pattern on Preston's eastern side: housing on the ridges, habitat in the valleys between them, because the valleys were too steep and too wet to build on. The whole eastern green network exists for that reason, not by design.

The Guild Wheel

The eastern arc of the Guild Wheel runs through this area, linking the valleys and the suburban parks on its way round the top of the city. Grange Park is one of the more practical access points on that quarter, because it has streets and parking around it where the valley paths do not.

The eastern quarter is the one most cyclists find hardest to remember afterwards, because it lacks the river and the canal that give the other three their character. It is, however, the quietest.

Getting there

Grange is a little over two miles east of Preston city centre, on the local bus network; travel covers it. The walk out from the centre is through residential streets and is not itself worth doing.

Arriving from the Wheel is better. The parks and gardens index says which of Preston's parks justify a dedicated journey, and this is not one of them — the reserve beside it is the reason to come.

Where it fits

Preston's park estate divides three ways: the ornamental Victorian pair on the river slope, the large flat municipal ground at Moor Park, and the district parks serving the suburbs. Grange is firmly the third kind.

Judged as that it is one of the better ones, mostly because of the valley. A district park with a nature reserve attached is doing more than its brief required.

The post war suburbs, and their open space

Grange belongs to Preston's post war expansion, and owes nothing to its Victorian one, and post war planning treated open space differently. Where the Victorian corporation built one large ornamental park for the whole town, the post war one distributed smaller provisions through the estates it built.

The result is that eastern Preston has more small parks and fewer grand ones. Neither approach is obviously better, but they produce quite different cities to walk in: the Victorian pattern gives you a destination, the post war pattern gives you somewhere near every front door.

Grange Park is a good example of the second kind, and the reserve beside it is a reminder that the best open space in this part of the city was never planned at all — it was simply too steep to build on.