River Ribble

Preston Docks

Another trip to Preston to visit my sister and a chance to explore old haunts alongside the River Ribble. I was amazed at how much of the town I had visited whilst still at Primary school. We started our walk at Broadgate, next to Penwortham Holme, where my school had entered me in the Lancashire Primary School Sprint Race. My Dad had taken the afternoon off work to watch. Despite the Elliman's Muscle Rub for horses and dogs that he had bought me, in my Woolworth's goloshes, I was no match for the boys in spikes. I made the final but only managed to come fifth. Broadgate had benefited from some serious flood protection construction with sturdy concrete walling topped by thick glass to prevent the Ribble from bursting its banks onto the low-lying houses of Broadgate. 

We entered the recently upgraded Miller Park under the main railway bridge. I had spent hours here on Saturday afternoons and school holidays as a 10 and 11-year-old watching the abundance of steam locomotives whilst playing football with other train spotters on the footpaths below the magnificent offices of Lancashire County Council. Austerity has resulted in them being sold and then emptied by developers and subsequently vandalised. The developers had plans for redevelopment as a hotel. The location adjacent to the railway station and splendid Miller and Avenham Parks, and proximity to Winckley Square, could not be better, but developers are notoriously fickle when it comes to delivering projects.

We walked along the banks of the river to the new Tramway Bridge, which provides a direct footpath/cycleway from Bamber Bridge to the City Centre. We wandered through Avenham Park, which we had visited every Easter Monday for the pace egg racing down the slopes. In those days, before the commercialisation of Easter by the chocolate companies, easter eggs were boiled eggs that had been painted. Avenham Park is a natural amphitheatre and hosts events for the Preston Guild every 20 years, as well as outdoor concerts. 

Preston's City Centre is built at the top of the scarp slope above the parks. It takes you into Winckley Square, a green space in the midst of Georgian buildings that host professional offices, numerous restaurants, the majority of Preston's blue plaques and an asylum centre. We reached Fishergate, the main shopping street that has been made pedestrian-friendly and traffic-calmed, allowing only one-way movement of buses and taxis. It worked well, and even on a dull Tuesday morning, there was a good footfall, interrupted only by the ubiquitous scourge of city centres, the Uber e-bikes that are ridden with little respect for pedestrians. We retreated to the 1950s for a coffee in Bruccianis, which has hardly changed since I was taken there as a toddler by my mother every Friday morning to meet my gran and a hot milk and toasted teacake.

I had walked 4 kilometres by the time we returned to the car; my third-longest new hip walk. On the way back, we took a diversion to see the old Preston Dock, which had been the largest single dock basin in Europe before it closed in 1979. It was where cotton, bananas and wood had been imported. I had often visited it with my parents or with Uncle Jim, who was a lorry driver who would get access to the dockside where I could watch the ships  being unloaded. It was a busy port with twenty or so cargo ships docked in the basin but the Ribble estuary could not take the larger ships, so it is now a massive marina, largely unused. My nephew has a flat in the residential development that overlooks the dock on the southside, whilst business units on the north and east sides. Jaunt over, the next step was for only the second time in seven months to find an EV charger that was available and worked; range anxiety was real.

Avenham Park and River Ribble

New Tramway Bridge

Winckley Square

Fishergate

Brucciannis

County Buildings