Winckley Square Gardens: Preston's restored garden square

Not a park but a square, and the one place in Preston where the city looks like a nineteenth-century professional town instead of an industrial one.

Winckley Square is a garden square laid out in the nineteenth century on the southern edge of Preston town centre, and it is the best surviving piece of the city's polite architecture. The gardens in the middle are public; the buildings around them were built as merchants' and professionals' houses and are now mostly offices, chambers and schools.

It is included here among the parks and gardens because it functions as public green space, but it is worth being clear that it is a different kind of thing from Moor Park or Avenham. A square is enclosed by its buildings and belongs to them; a park is a landscape that the city gave itself.

How the square was laid out

The square was developed as Preston's professional quarter in the nineteenth century, on ground just south of the commercial centre and just north of the drop to the Ribble. That siting is the whole point: close enough to walk to business, far enough to be out of the smoke, and with the parkland slope immediately beyond.

The garden inside is a simple composition — lawns, perimeter walks, mature trees, and railings dividing it from the carriageway — and it was always meant to be looked at from the surrounding windows as much as walked in. The trees are the oldest thing about it and the reason it reads as green from every approach.

The restoration

By the late twentieth century the square had suffered the usual fate of an urban garden surrounded by offices: worn surfaces, lost railings, thinned planting and a reputation as a shortcut as opposed to a place. It was restored as public garden with heritage funding, which returned the paths, the railings and the planting structure.

The restoration is why it is now worth going to, not merely passing through. It is also the reason it appears on the blue plaque heritage walk, which uses the square as its turning point.

Who lived here, and what the buildings are now

The houses around Winckley Square were built for Preston's professional and mercantile class, and several carry blue plaques recording the people who lived in them. The uses have changed almost completely: solicitors' and accountants' offices, a school, and converted apartments now occupy what were single family houses.

The consequence for a visitor is that the square is busiest at lunchtime on a weekday and very quiet at weekends, which is the reverse of every park in the city. If you want it empty, come on a Sunday morning.

Where it sits in a walk

Winckley Square is five minutes from Fishergate and five minutes from the top of Avenham Park, which makes it the natural link between the shopping centre and the river slope. The sequence Fishergate, Winckley Square, Avenham, river is the best short walk in Preston.

The trees, and why the square reads green

The mature trees are the square's real structure. They predate the restoration by well over a century, they are the reason the garden reads as a green block from every street that approaches it, and they are why the square is noticeably cooler than Fishergate on a hot afternoon. In a city centre with very little canopy, that matters more than the planting beds do.

Their scale also explains why the garden feels larger than its area. Standing in the middle you cannot see the whole square, which is unusual for a space this size and is entirely the effect of the trees, not of the layout.

Blue plaques and the walk that uses them

Several of the houses around the square carry blue plaques, and they are the densest concentration of them in Preston. That is why the square is the turning point of the blue plaque heritage walk as opposed to one stop among many: the walk goes out through the commercial centre and comes back through the professional one.

Reading the plaques takes about twenty minutes and is the most efficient history lesson available in the city centre. The names are mostly local — industrialists, reformers, lawyers — which is the point: this is where the people who ran nineteenth century Preston actually lived.