History of Preston1780 to 1900
Acknowledgement; A History of Preston by David Hunt. Excellent information very much summarised here and built upon.
Preston developed its cotton industry from around 1780. Early production was based on Hargreaves 'Spinning Jenny' and Cromptons 'Mule' which required hand, horse or windmill to power it. The reason for this being that Preston had no fast running streams so the Arkwrights water frame could not be used.
Names such as Horrocks are still known to this date. It is 198 years since John Horrocks died. One of the major founders of cotton in Preston. The old wall that stood on London Road facing New Hall Lane was Horrocks mill and only recently became a Sainsbury Homebase. This factory was a massive undertaking filling a large area close to the centre of the town. A model is in the Harris Museum. High brick walls against the street are typical in Preston, there is one in Roebuck Street. They are the walls of an early version of mill that pre-dates the large multi-storey glass window type of mill built in the second half of the 19th Century.
Several of Prestons finest buildings came from the cotton moguls. Harris Library and Institute, Miller Arcade. The parks; Avenham, Miller, Moor, Haslam and Ashton were built around the mid-1800's largely to employ people hit by the cotton famine of the 1860's.
The first spinning mill was built by William Collison about 1777 in Moor Lane. In 1785 John Watson built a factory in Lower Penwortham. In 1785 a factory in Dale Street was built which was bought by John Watson in 1803.
John Horrocks built his first Preston factory in Dale Street in 1791. It was called the 'Yellow Factory' after its faded whitewash and was so large that its sponsors panicked. By 1820 Preston had around 12 mills and by 1846 there were 42 employing 20% of the population. In 1845 the largest power loom weaving shed in the world was built by William Ainsworth. By 1850 there were 64 mills. The peak of Prestons growth was being reached fairly soon in the Lancashire Cotton cycle as towns like Oldham built newer and larger mills later.
The population of Preston grew from 12,000 in 1800 to 70,000 in 1850 and 100,000 by 1880. The housing development was largely ad hoc with building of terraced houses around mills. No made up roads that became full of mud and open sewage. These conditions gradually spread. Church Street, Avenham Lane, New Hall Lane, Friargate all contained closely packed houses with ginnels, industrial buildings, slaughterhouses. Except for Winckley Square with its pleasant Georgian houses.
It was 1880 before rules became established about such taken for granted things as a front door step so that the ground floor was above the level of the road, backyards containing a water closet with an access along the back of the house. In the late 19th Century Preston was for 15 years the town with the highest numbers of infant mortalities in Britain with figures of over 250 deaths per 1000. Surprising that with development of transport and communications; canals in 1790's, railways in 1830's, telegraph in 1850's, docks in 1880's, sporting clubs in the 1860's and fine public parks that life wasn't more amenable.
The latter part of the 19th Century brought some significant buildings; the Town Hall 1862 (burnt down 1947), Covered Market in 1875, Harris Library and Art Gallery finished in 1893, Miller Arcade finished 1898 so Preston was taking on a look that is familiar today.
Winckley Square website: http://www.winckleysquare.org.uk/