The name means "priest town" in Old English; the church held extensive tracts of land here. It sits at the crossing of the River Ribble on the main route up Britain's west coast towards Scotland, which made it strategically useful for centuries. Armies marched through. Two battles were fought here, one in 1648 when Cromwell trounced the Royalists at Ribbleton, and one in 1715 when the Hanoverian troops took heavier casualties but still captured the Jacobite Old Pretender's force after street fighting. Both battles are now marked by street names rather than visible scars. The street names Fishergate and Friargate end in "gate" — Old Norse for street, not gate, because Preston was never a walled city. It remained a small market town until cotton arrived in the nineteenth century. Population in 2021 was 148,000.

Preston's water is soft and pure from upland sources, which made it perfect for cotton processing — Yorkshire's hard water suited wool but not cotton. The mills boomed. Wealth came to a few, exhaustion came to many, and labour migrated in from Ireland and Glasgow because conditions there were even worse. Marx noticed. Leyland, a few miles south, turned cotton-trade engineering skills into the buses and trucks that British Leyland would later mass-produce. Aircraft were built at Warton and Samlesbury, and still are — any large commercial aircraft you see on finals over the city today is bringing company executives to BAE Systems. The docks at the south of the city closed in 1981, killed by container shipping that ships couldn't be fitted up the shallow Ribble for, but the aircraft work continued and the university — UCLAN, formerly a polytechnic — now teaches 25,000 students.

In 1917, munitions workers at the Dick, Kerr & Co engineering plant formed a football team. Preston already had Preston North End, which had been one of the founding clubs of the Football League in 1888 and won the first League and FA Cup double. The new team was different. They drew enormous crowds — 53,000 at Goodison Park on Boxing Day 1920 — raised money for wounded servicemen, and played some of the best football in the country. The Football Association banned them in 1921 because they were women. The official reason was that football was "quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged." The Dick, Kerr Ladies kept playing on non-FA grounds until 1965, when the team finally folded. The FA ban on women's football was lifted in 1971. By then, four decades of women's football history had been driven underground from a Preston factory.

Nick Park was born in Preston in 1958 and grew up here. He created Wallace and Gromit. In the 1995 short A Close Shave, the villain is a sinister sheepdog named Preston — Park's quiet hometown shout-out. The pair now stand outside Market Hall at the top of Earl Street, posing in a scene from The Wrong Trousers. They sit a hundred yards north of the Harris Museum, the same Harris Museum that was funded by Edward Harris (1804-1877), the local lawyer whose bequest also founded the institute that became UCLAN. Other Prestonians of note: Sir Richard Arkwright (1732-1792), inventor of the spinning frame; Andrew Flintoff (b. 1977), England cricketer; Glubb Pasha (1897-1986), the British commander of Jordan's Arab Legion; and Robert W. Service (1874-1954), who wrote The Cremation of Sam McGee and other Yukon ballads while sitting in a bank in the Canadian frozen north.

Preston Guild is a civic festival held once every two decades — a frequency so rare that "once every Preston Guild" became Lancashire slang for "hardly ever." The tradition dates from a royal charter in 1179 granting Preston the right to a guild merchant. From 1542 it has been held every twenty years, almost without exception. The 2012 Guild filled the streets for weeks with processions, performances and parties. The next is in 2032. Other things to find: Miller Arcade, the 1899 Victorian shopping arcade modelled on Burlington Arcade in London; the Brutalist 1969 bus station, twice nearly demolished and now Grade II listed; St Walburge's Catholic church, with its 309-foot spire visible across the city; and Avenham and Miller Parks south of Winckley Square, where the Ribble carves a natural amphitheatre.

Joseph Livesey (1794-1884), a Preston cheesemonger, publisher and social reformer, founded the British Temperance movement here in 1833. One of his disciples had a stutter and emphasised that one should abstain "tee- tee- totally," giving the world the word teetotalism. Britain's first KFC opened on Fishergate in 1965, a decade ahead of any other British branch — Harry Latham, who had worked directly with Colonel Sanders in the US, brought the franchise to his home town and went on to direct KFC's UK expansion. Late at night, after the Fishergate KFC and the pubs closed, life-sized cardboard cut-outs of the Colonel used to appear at bus stops across town. Local specialities are Lancashire cheese, Goosnargh cake, and butter pie — potatoes, onions, and butter, no meat, traditional half-time fare at Preston North End and still made by an artisan supplier in the city.