Preston has proved to be one of the most adaptable of northern England's towns. It was one of only four Lancashire towns to be a royal borough in medieval times, and its guild, originally held to grant the freedoms of the borough to new generations of citizens, is the only one surviving in Britain. In the nineteenth century, however, Preston became a major industrial town based on the cotton trade, and was regarded as an archetype of the industrial town by writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, Lewis Mumford and Michael Anderson. Michael Anderson, in his study of the effects of industrialisation on family structure, chose to study Preston as it ‘was in most relevant ways typical of the larger towns of the area’. Yet Preston, unlike many other industrial towns, was able to diversify away from its reliance on an export-oriented staple industry, and in this century has been relatively successful in gaining new branches of industry (British Aerospace and British Nuclear Fuels Ltd became major employers after World War II), and in becoming a regional service centre (it houses the headquarters of Lancashire County Council), and Preston's unemployment rate remained somewhat below the national average during the recession of the 1980s.

This transition has not however been a smooth one. Indeed the later nineteenth century was a period of considerable economic recession in Preston, which was of great importance in affecting the capacities of different occupational groups in the town.