December 4th, 2005
Preston
A couple days ago Punkass (www.sheeparegreat.com) put some pictures of Santa Cruz up on flickr.
Inspired by this Biff put some pictures of Eastbourne on cheeky. Where Punkass had cool pics of tracks in the sand and cool skateboard dudes, Biff had old codgers wandering round an identikit town centre in the pissing rain. As irony it was bang on.
So inspired by Biff and Punkass I thought I’d take some pictures of the town to the north, Preston. It insists on calling itself a city, but it’s attitude is too parochial for me to grant it that honorific.
First off I rode out of town on the canal. True to form the people of the area surrounding the canal basin had dumped a shopping trolley in the water.
Before I go any further I think you should know something about the transport history of Preston.
First came the Romans, who camped to the East (Ribchester) and to the West (Kirkham). They avoided Preston. It’s mentioned in the Domesday book as “an shitehole”* When the Industrial Revolution happened someone had the bright idea of building a canal from Liverpool to Preston. But they reached Chorley, thought better of it, and headed East to Leeds instead.** The good burghers of Preston built a canal from Lancaster to Preston. However they were too stupid to take it all the way to the river (which ran further North then than it does now), and built a canal basin 200 yards away from the very thing that would have enabled them to join in the greatest transport network of the early 19th Century. And when Britain built it’s first motorway it was built so that people could bypass Preston instead of having to go into the bloody place.
Even today it has an outer ring road that requires you to travel through some of the most congested junctions in town to join it. And don’t even start on the inner ring road. Preston has so many traffic lights that it was rumoured in the 90’s that the head of the council was being given back-handers to install them at every junction.
The canal link to the river was finally completed in 2000 as a Millennium project, a hundred years after there was any commercial use for it. Better late than never I suppose.
To celebrate the opening of the canal a large naked man looking with contemplation on the canal was erected. In summer he mainly looks upon the idiots who ignore the warning signs and insist on swimming in blue-green algae infested deep water.
I headed West along the canal towpath, that soon degenerated into a 2-inch wide rut of gravel surrounded by mud on which skinny cross tyres had no purchase. By the time I’d ridden round the back of the Nuclear Fuel Processing plant, so recently reprieved by arch-environmentalist Tony Bliar I was knackered. From there I risked life and limb on Lancashire’s cycle lanes to watch some schoolboy motocross. It’s years since I rode a motorbike off-road, and here were 8 year olds getting more air than I ever got.
Finally before I reached home the sun came out. The tide was in and I took this shot of the bridge over the Ribble reflected in the water.
I came home glad to live south of the river. It may only be a few yards of water that separate us from Preston, but it really is another, better, world over here.
* I may have made this up.
** but this one really is true.
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