The Preston Martyrs Memorial stands outside the old Corn Exchange on Lune Street — a striking modern sculpture by Gordon Young of four life-sized bronze figures, one of them sprawled in the act of falling. It commemorates the four Preston weavers shot dead by troops during the 1842 strike, a watershed moment in the history of British labour relations.
The memorial is unsentimental and confrontational — Young rejected anything that would soften the violence — and is one of the most powerful pieces of late-twentieth-century public sculpture in the north-west. The Corn Exchange itself, now an entertainment venue, is the actual building outside which the shootings took place.