Preston's closing PAD Gallery

As a new city Preston has the opportunity to reinvent itself as whatever it chooses to be. The slate is clean, the old industrial ways of the North fading away and newer possibilities could lie ahead.
Preston is a city full of students with the evergrowing UCLan campus sprawling across & through the centre - a centre that surely can create a vibrancy with more potential than 75p a pint happy hours and kebab shops. Humankind must be able aim a little higher than a new shopping complex and bus station. To create a legacy from this empty page and the limits of imagination can't be that imposing for a council, can it?
With all these students and all the permanent residents, with all the beautiful old buildings still dotted across the streets, and certainly with the fact that this is a CITY, the arts must be well taken care of in Preston mustn't they? Mustn't they?
Outside of the venerable Harris ( every town must have a museum... ), there was the one gallery. One gallery away from the upstairs of gift shops and framing places, one hall in the whole of Preston's city centre, one room funded by the city for the arts......
And on the 31st October 2010 it closes.
Blamed on the imminent cutbacks that will decimate the arts ( and most nonessential things in this country ), it is such a shame in hindsight that when times were good we didn't open more so that when the times got tough, the only one didn't have to close.