Should a vibrant and entirely self-funded sports and community centre be knocked down to create a bus turning circle?

Tonight was a hustings meeting for Fishwick by-election candidates at JALGOS, a sports and social club in Preston city centre. Neither the Labour nor the Conservative candidate were able to attend.

The Conservative (who lives just down the road) claimed she didn’t receive the invitation until Monday (three or four days after the same postman delivered the same letter to me). She also had a prior engagement.

The Labour candidate claimed the chairman of the meeting (the independent councillor for the Town Centre ward) would not be independent and that she had a prior engagement.

Preston North End lost 5-1 to Spurs tonight.

JALGOS has spent 46 years quietly serving much of Preston’s Afro-Caribbean community (which is certainly not to say that it is a closed group). It is a club which has hosted the wedding receptions, christenings, wakes, 18th birthday parties and family reunions of hundreds of people.

The club offers a dining club for its elderly members and delivers meals to those who are housebound.

It regularly hosts visitors from across the country and, indeed, the Commonwealth including the Jamaican High Commissioner.

If this club were called a community centre no-one would dream of sending in the bulldozers. If this club had an altar, it would certainly be safe.

Yet it would appear that the plans to redevelop Preston’s city centre have now changed such that the building will need to be flattened in order to create a bus turning circle.

JALGOS is the beating heart of a significant proportion of Preston’s community. It must be saved. Join Preston’s Liberal Democrats in campaigning for this asset to the city to be saved.

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