Current Time in Preston, United Kingdom

Preston stands on the north bank of the River Ribble in Lancashire, in the north-west of England, roughly midway between Manchester and the Lake District. The city centre occupies a low ridge above the river, with parkland dropping down to the water and the Pennine hills visible to the east. Its position at the lowest convenient crossing point of the Ribble has made it a route centre since Roman times.

Around one hundred and fifty thousand people live in the city and well over three hundred thousand in the surrounding district and urban area. Preston is the administrative capital of Lancashire, seat of the county council and its courts, and a centre for aerospace engineering, public administration, retail and higher education. It was granted city status in 2002 to mark the Golden Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.

The town received its first charter in 1179, and with it the right to hold the Preston Guild, a civic celebration staged every twenty years and unique in Britain. The phrase once in a Preston Guild passed into the English language to mean a very rare event. The Guild has been held almost without interruption for eight centuries, most recently in 2012. Preston was fought over in the Civil War and again during the Jacobite rising of 1715, and in the nineteenth century it became a cotton town, its skyline filled with mill chimneys. Richard Arkwright, whose spinning frame helped launch the factory system, was born here in 1732. Industrial conflict was fierce, and the long lock-out of the 1850s is generally taken as the inspiration for the fictional town in Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times.

The Harris Museum and Art Gallery, a magnificent Greek Revival building on the market square, houses art, local history and a public library and is the city's architectural showpiece. St Walburge's Church has the tallest spire of any parish church in England, a needle of pale stone visible for miles. Avenham and Miller Parks descend gracefully to the Ribble, and the Brutalist bus station of 1969, once threatened with demolition, is now a listed building admired by architecture enthusiasts. The Ribble Steam Railway runs along the old docks.

Preston North End, founded in the nineteenth century, won the very first Football League title without losing a match and remains a source of local pride at Deepdale, one of the oldest grounds in the world still in continuous use. The city has substantial Gujarati Indian and Pakistani communities whose festivals, especially the Preston Mela, are part of the civic calendar, alongside markets, music venues and a lively student nightlife.

Britain's first stretch of motorway, the Preston bypass, opened here in 1958 and is now part of the M6. West Coast Main Line trains reach London in a little over two hours, and Manchester Airport is close. The University of Central Lancashire is one of the largest modern universities in the country.

Preston combines centuries of civic tradition with the everyday energy of a working northern city.