Preston Heritage Open Days (Virtual Event)

This year Preston Heritage Open Days is going online as well as onsite as part of the free annual national festival celebrating local historic buildings and heritage. From Friday 11 to Sunday 20 September there are online events available via the listings on the Heritage Open Days website www.heritageopendays.org.uk as well as a few places to visit in person.

You can take a virtual look round Fulwood Barracks with Lancashire Infantry Museum, take to the digital stage with Preston Playhouse and explore UCLan's Campus from the comfort of your sofa. Whatever the weather outside, online you can stroll round Avenham and Miller Parks in brilliant sunshine and cloudless skies and discover hidden corners of the parks to visit in future.

Lancashire Archives are celebrating their 80th anniversary with a Twitter display of treasures from the collection, and the 45th anniversary of their Bow Lane building with a discovery point on their gates. UCLan's Special Collections hold a fascinating archive of temperance material - as befits the home of the teetotal movement - and have digitised early Temperance magazines as well as providing a virtual exhibition, Demon Drink: Temperance and the Working Class.

Preston Central Methodist Church was planning to open for the first time this year, but instead has created a 360 degree view of the church interior with fascinating insights - their seating comes from an unusual source!

For the past few years, Broughton village has has welcomed visitors to the Church Cottage museum. It's too small to open this year, but the parish council are offering an online talk about the village that was for centuries on the main road north from Preston, together with two walking - or just reading - trails to download.

Several of Preston's historic churches are planning to open their doors for Heritage Open Days - with special precautions. For insights into the diversity of Victorian Catholic church architecture, visit the Grade I listed St Walburge's, its sister church English Martyrs and city-centre St Wilfrid's (which also has an online e-tour). St Michael and All Angels in Ashton is also both online and onsite with an illustrated leaflet to download and an external trail during its monthly Farmer's Market - find out what the church might have looked like with a tower.

And finally Preston's Heritage is an online event using the launch of the Preston Heritage Open Days website to provide links to some of the superb resources about Preston, its buildings, places and history, and to offer a home to some quirky digital activities highlighting aspects of Preston and its surrounding urban and rural areas.

Because of the ever evolving Covid19 situation, Preston HODs is asking visitors to check for last-minute changes before setting out for any onsite events. A cancellation notification will be added to the HODs listings and tweeted on @PrestonHODs.