It's currently the Preston Guild, an historic celebration that only happens once every twenty years, and that has taken place since 1179. In its current iteration, the Guild is an eclectic week-long celebration with processions, concerts, parties, lectures and all sorts of projects, exhibitions and installations.
Since the end of July, I've been working on the Preston3Twenty writing project for the Guild along with David Gaffney and Richard Evans, whose commissioned stories 'Freakout in a Moonage Daydream' and 'Priest' are set in the Preston of 1972 and 2072 respectively. The stories were written to be listened to in locations of our choosing around the city. My story, 'Gold Threads', is set in 2012 and takes you on a walk from here
to here
to here
to here
to here
And like all the stories I've ever managed to write, it didn't end up where I thought it would at all. One of the lovely things about writing a story that is going to be experienced in the landscape it's set is that you have to spend a lot of time in that landscape, and while I was wandering the streets and sitting in shopping centres and watching the river, I found a completely different story. I was trying to write something about recession-hit Preston, but ended up with something more about the resilience of things lost, and the way they can be inherited and transposed into our surroundings through the stories we are given.
At the last Guild I was 11, and I remember my parents taking me and my sister to Avenham Park to watch a Civil War re-enactment. Yesterday, I took my sons to the far end of the same park to play in the temporarily-installed luminarium, and we had an amazing time, tumbling together through colours and light and air...
I've heard quite a few people, even locally, asking what the Guild is and what on earth it's for, but, for someone who was in a very uncelebratory mood about the Jubilee and the Olympics, the Guild makes an unexpected sense to me. The gaps between Guilds are so large that to think ahead to the next one feels unreal. They are long loops of years that tie generations together, marking time in a place with memories that can be pinned down.
The Preston3Twenty stories are available as downloads, or on MP3 players you can hire, from MAP — They Eat Culture's pop-up space in the St George's Shopping Centre — until the 9th September. Words from the stories will be appearing around the city as temporary installations over the next few days. The project will continue with new writers picking up the baton (or pen) each year for the next nineteen years, writing paths of story all over Preston. And the Guild will come again when my sons are both adults and I'm 51...