Not motoring
Preston pride
Gavin Stamp
Preston is about halfway along and cer- tainly the most important stop on the main line from Euston to Glasgow (although, in these sad times, with the flashy red and white Virgin having succeeded the maroon of LMS, the railway traveller tries to ensure that, if possible, he or she travels down the east coast). Coming from the south, the train rumbles across the Ribble before arriving in the big, generous station with its central island platform created by London & North-Western Railway in the late Victorian decades. Arriving from the north, the significant landmark for me is the sight across playing fields of the long, long clerestory and tough brick campanile of St Anthony's Roman Catholic Church, the very last work of Sir Giles Scott, the great architect of Liverpool Cathedral.
Preston's great ecclesiastical landmark is older and more central, however, and it is the needle-thin spire of St Walburge's, ris- ing to over 300 feet and way above the Apparently he smoked.' unbroken roof planes of slates on the spiky church below. It was all designed by Joseph Aloysius Hansom', he who had given Birm- ingham its Corinthian temple-cum-town hall and the world the eponymous cab. In Preston, for the town's burgeoning Roman Catholic population, he used Geometrical Decorated but the church is far from being a conventional Gothic Revival building, for its nave is a single, vast space, with no aisles but covered by a massive timber roof with full-sized figures of saints standing on the hammer-beams. It is all rather aston- ishing.
St Walburge's with its most distinctive spire sits on a confined site on the peninsu- lar between the main line to Scotland and the curve of the branch to Blackpool. On the whole, the railway did well by Preston. Although it is an old town — with a charter granted by Henry II and the place where Richard Arkwright perfected the steam- powered spinning-wheel — it was being a stop on the main line north that generated its Victorian prosperity. The motor-car is quite another matter, of course. The Ring Way slices through the town centre, cutting Friargate in half, leaving the old Corn Exchange — now a pub — next to an urban desert of clearance and spawning multi-storey carparks and the nastiest of cheap superstores. It is the usual story of myopic town planning fuelled by car wor- ship.
The disasters wrought by carelessness and the car are best symbolised by the sad fate of St Mary's Chapel. This was the old- est surviving Roman Catholic place of wor- ship in the town, and Pevsner's North Lancashire told me it was to be reached through an arch of Friargate. No longer: there may be a small shrine to Our Lady up the flight of steps but beyond there is merely waste ground covered in cars — 'St Mary's Car Park' as it is insultingly described. And this happened only a few years ago. Surely so precious a building could have found a new use, like the Angli- can church of St Peter by Rickman — he who gave us `E.E.', 'Dec.' and Terp.' which has now been taken over as an arts centre by the University of Central Lan- cashire, that ubiquitous new institution which might indicate the nobler aspirations of the town if it were not already confirmed by the existence of good second-hand bookshops.
But, although the only world-shaking piece of news the local paper thought fit to advertise on the newstands was 'Guide to Car Parks for Christmas Shopping', I rather like Preston. The town manifests a confident, friendly, unaffected local pride which has survived the mistakes of the 1960s and the 1970s. And, above all, it can boast the extraordinary, the unique Harris Free Public Library and Museum.
From the railway, the skyline of the town centre is dominated (still) by spires and the Wren-church-like steeple of the County Sessions Hall, but what stands out most is a big square tower, with a continuous line of windows separated by square columns. This is the attic storey of a temple of culture paid for by the legacy of Edmund Robert Harris, a philanthropic local solicitor who inherited money and made lots more. `To Literature, Arts and Sciences' is inscribed above the grand Ionic portico facing Pre- ston's Market Place, yet it was all built in the 1880s, when the Greek Revival had been out of fashion for decades. That did not worry James Hibbert, alderman and local architect, who got this plum job.
Poor Pevsner was baffled; in thrall, as he was, to the demands of his own zeitgeist, he found the building `almost unbelievably late for the style . .. It ought to be contem- porary with St George's Hall in Liverpool, but has quite near parallels of similar dates in Glasgow.' Indeed it has, and Hibbert's defence of his design seems to echo the words of Glasgow's original genius, Alexan- der 'Greek' Thomson, for he wrote how
the monumental art of Greece and Rome speaks a language the subtlest excellencies of which can reach and be appreciated by thou- sands of every race and clime. As long as civilisation lasts these excellencies will con- tinue to speak an unvarying and imperishable language to unborn millions. Truly, they are eternal!
Despite the carparks and susperstores, civilisation is alive and well in Preston. The Harris Building flourishes. The public library which Harris cared deeply about still occupies the ground floor of Hibbert's masterpiece, while on the upper floors there is a fine local collection of paintings, whose variety and quality will surprise nobody except Londoners. Meanwhile, there is a vigorous programme of modern exhibitions while the didactic glories of the collections are interpreted for a wider pub- lic without their integrity being under- mined. So next time you are passing through Preston, alight from your (late) Virgin train and walk the half mile up Fish- ergate until the Market Place appears on the right to reveal Hibbert's Ionic portico rising above the massive rusticated podium.
The `widely unknown' Hibbert — as Pevsner cleverly described him — aspired to build 'a work of permanent value' as might stand `above the fluctuations of ephemeral taste'. I forbear to comment on the possible relevance of his success in realising that high ideal to contemporary museum design.
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