Preston, Lancashire after 1948, Preston became home to a significant number of Asian and Caribbean Commonwealth immigrants, who mostly worked in the manufacturing industry. However, an economic decline hit the town once again in the 1970s, capped by the closure of the Courtaulds factory in 1979 (nearly 3,000 job losses) and the decline of the docks on the River Ribble, which finally closed in 1981. Mass unemployment was firmly back in Preston by the early 1980s, although it was now very much a national crisis due to the recession of that time. The rehousing of families from town centre slums to new
Stand by the River Stand by the River Stand by the River is a musical written by Joanne and Mark Sutton-Smith based on the life of abolitionist William Still, his liberation of Jane Johnson and her two sons from slavery in 1855, and the federal trial that summer. A member of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia and chairman of its Vigilance Committee, Still took Johnson and her sons from her master and into hiding just before their ship was to depart. They were en route from Washington, DC to New York City (from where they would sail to Nicaragua with her master.) He