Preston built the factory, then the motorway
- Birthplace of Richard Arkwright, 1732
- Britain’s first motorway, 1958
- The Guild — once every 20 years
- England’s 50th city, 2002
How Preston grew
Canals, then railways, then computers. Pick a year.
The first royal charter
Henry II granted Preston its charter, and out of it grew the Guild — a roll of the traders licensed to do business in the town. It is the only guild in the country still celebrated.
Richard Arkwright, born here in 1732
Richard Arkwright was born in Preston in 1732, the youngest of thirteen children in a family that could not afford to school him. He worked as a barber and wigmaker before turning to machinery, developed the water frame for spinning cotton, and then did the thing that mattered more than the machine: he organised people around it.
Arkwright is generally credited with creating the factory system — continuous production, a disciplined workforce, and machinery powered from a single source. It made him extremely rich and reshaped how nearly everyone in Britain worked.
Preston has an ambivalent relationship with him, which seems fair. He is the reason for a great deal of prosperity and a great deal of misery, often in the same building.
What that means if you trade in Preston
Preston is central Lancashire’s hub, serving a ring of towns that each have their own identity and their own suspicion of being lumped in with the others.
It is a market where being straightforward beats being polished. Businesses that overreach in their language tend to be trusted less, not more.
What Preston businesses ask us for
Name the towns
Chorley, Leyland, Bamber Bridge, Fulwood. Each will check whether you mean them.
Plain language
Understatement travels further here than superlatives.
Be reachable
A phone number answered by a person is a genuine differentiator in this market.
The tech scene here
Preston’s digital economy sits on top of an engineering one, and that shapes it. This is central Lancashire: aerospace, advanced manufacturing and the software that runs them, rather than a consumer-app cluster.
The University of Lancashire — renamed from UCLan, and still the same campus in the middle of town — anchors it. Its Engineering Innovation Centre is a £35m teaching and research building working on additive manufacturing, intelligent systems, drones and high-performance computing, and it works directly with industry rather than around it.
For a small business the practical read is simple: there are skilled people here, and your customers are used to dealing with firms that know what they are doing. Vagueness stands out.
Tech events and meet-ups
Smaller than a big city’s calendar, and more useful for it — you will meet the same people twice.
Lancashire Digital Hub
Runs the county’s regular digital meet-ups, including a monthly lunchtime session in Preston. Free, and aimed at people who actually build things.
Preston Tech Connection
A community group for people working in and around digital technology in the city — talks, projects and the sort of help you cannot buy.
What Society1 runs
The city-centre coworking space hosts meet-ups and events through the year, and lets you work there for the day around them.
Where people work
Preston city centre is small enough to walk across, which means most of this is within ten minutes of the railway station.
Society1
The city’s coworking space, on Cross Street. Hot desks, fixed desks, meeting rooms and a leased gigabit line, used by well over a hundred businesses and freelancers.
The Engineering Innovation Centre
The University of Lancashire’s £35m engineering building on the Preston campus — labs, workshops and a deliberate front door for industry.
BAE Systems at Warton and Samlesbury
Just outside the city: Typhoon final assembly at Warton, F-35 and front-fuselage work at Samlesbury, and around twelve thousand people across the two sites. A large part of the local supply chain exists to serve them.
Preston’s festivals
One of these runs twice a decade. One of them runs twice a century, which is not a typo.
Encounter Festival
Preston’s free outdoor arts festival — street theatre, live music and a torchlight procession through the city centre. Arts Council funded and grown out of the Guild.
The Preston Guild
Every twenty years, and the only guild still celebrated in the country. The last was 2012; the next is 2032. The whole city turns out for it.
The Harris
The museum, gallery and library in the middle of the Flag Market, and the anchor of the Harris Quarter around it.
The Preston Model
Worth knowing if you sell to organisations rather than households. Preston City Council and a group of local anchor institutions — the county council, the university, the colleges, the housing association, the constabulary — deliberately set out to spend more of their procurement budget inside Preston and Lancashire rather than outside it.
It has a name now, the Preston Model, and it is studied well beyond Lancashire. The practical version for a small supplier: being visibly, checkably local is worth something real here in a way it is not everywhere.
Which puts a certain weight on your website. If a buyer cannot tell from your site where you are and what you actually do, you are not in the running for the thing the policy exists to give you.
How local businesses use their sites
It changes by trade, but the website is nearly always the first contact — and usually the only one before someone spends money.
Trades and home services
The towns you cover, photos of real jobs, and a phone number you can see without scrolling. Most people are on a phone, halfway through a problem.
Clinics, salons and studios
People expect to book online. If they have to ring during working hours, they book somewhere else.
Shops, cafés and bars
Menus, stock, opening hours and where you are — all current, all readable on a small screen.
Professional and B2B services
Say plainly what you do, name the people who do it, and make your address easy to find. See the Preston Model above for why that last one matters here.
Why FastSites works here
Preston does not reward a website that oversells. It rewards one that answers the question, loads quickly and tells somebody where you are. That is the sort of site we build: one page, live in days, at a price you can see before you talk to anyone.
Built for phones, because that is where your customers are. Written so you can name Chorley, Leyland, Bamber Bridge or Fulwood and turn up when someone there searches. No retainer, no four-month wait, and no agency you cannot get hold of afterwards.
How well do you know Preston?
Five quick questions. Get all five right and you win a 10% off discount code for your website. Every answer is somewhere on this page, so have a read if you get stuck.
Preston quiz · 1 of 5
The Preston Bypass opened in 1958. What was it the first of in Britain?
Common questions
The simplest one-page site starts at £15 a month, with the website build included and nothing to pay up front. Every plan and its price is published on the pricing page before you speak to anyone.
Sign-up takes about 3 minutes and the build questionnaire about 5. Most sites are then designed and built within 21 hours, and live within days of the brief being answered.
No setup fee and no hidden extras. Your monthly plan covers the website build and hosting. Done-for-you plans have a 12-month minimum term, then you can cancel any time from your dashboard.
Yes — you can upgrade at any time as your business grows, with no need to start over.