all illustrations by Ben Brumpton
I was four when A Close Shave first broadcast in 1995. My little brother and I watched Preston bursting out of the copper shell of the “Knit-O-Matic”, revealing his mechanical interior, and cowered behind cushions on the sofa. Half terror, half glee. It was probably the scariest thing we’d seen in our young lives. The name of the monster was a familiar one to us: the name of our town. At school one day, we learned the creator, Nick Park, was from Preston. Already, I had a deep desire to create things and knew I wanted to be an artist one day. This was the first artist I came across who shared an upbringing in the same place I lived. I rushed home and dug out the VHS to watch the trilogy with this new information fresh in my mind, a new sense of Prestonian pride stirring in my belly as the plasticine characters moved effortlessly across the screen. Until A Close Shave came on; since then my musings have been much more complicated.
Nearly 30 years on from my first encounter, I’m taking a lunch break, wandering the top of Orchard Street beneath Preston’s old Fish Market Canopy. Here is a bronze statue of Wallace and Gromit based on The Wrong Trousers, installed in September 2021. Wallace is in his ex-NASA techno-trousers, one leg cocked high in the air as though on an uncontrollable rampage, while talented Gromit sits on a bench in front of him reading the newspaper. With the recent release of Vengeance Most Fowl, The Wrong Trousers is having quite a revival, but this image was never my first thought when I think about the franchise’s connection to Preston… Biting into my sausage roll I wonder: Are we ever going to talk about the cyberdog?
In front of the bench (in case we have forgotten) there’s a plaque reminding us Nick Park is a fellow Prestonian. We love presenting the Oscar-winning animator as one of our own, and now we have a bronze statue to forever forge our bond to the man and his work. It makes sense we love Wallace & Gromit – every model is steeped in warm nostalgia and homely glow. There’s much comfort in the weaving of the miniature upholstery and of the brass band which welcomes us into a land of clunky inventions and endless cheese and crackers. Wallace & Gromit is a love letter to the collective culture of the North West, just not one addressed to Preston. It speaks volumes that West Wallaby Street is set in Wigan while an outstanding villain is named for Park’s hometown.
A Close Shave can be read as a rumination on the creator’s roots. The abundance of sheep offer a strong visual link to the sigil of Preston, the lamb. This image is developed further in an edition of Cracking Contraptions – Shaun replacing the lamb on Wallace’s PNE football shirt. Park spent his childhood here, but after completing an art foundation course at Preston College, he left to study in Sheffield. Graduating in Communication Art, he went on to study Animation at the National Film and Television School in Buckinghamshire where work began on Wallace and Gromit’s debut, A Grand Day Out. The short film took six years to make, meaning it wasn’t complete by the end of Park’s course. Fortunately, Aardman would ask him to complete the project in Bristol while he worked part time with them on other projects. While taking the development of Park’s creative practice into account, Preston is all but absent. This decision to relocate still faces Preston’s emerging artists today: to move to a place that actively nurtures our divergent ways of thinking, or to remain and try our luck at practicing here, at home.
Before plasticine, Park developed his practice through the easily accessible, low-cost materials available to him as a child. He’d use flip-books, paper, and felt cut-outs, turning cartoons into animations using a Cine Cam in the quiet privacy of his parents’ attic. Craft and artistic ability were valued in the sanctuary of the family home: “People would come to our house because my mum and dad would always supply us with loads of paper…” Park says, “and we’d make these giant papier-mâché monsters… it was like an ethos really.” Artists yearn for a place to share ideas and make creative mess without fear of getting into trouble. This freedom to follow our own agency is foundational in artistic ability. It takes lots of love and carefrom the community around us to nurture belief in our skills, to allow us to take the risks we need to move forward. While Prestonian red brick walls offer a space for nurture they also offer comfort and respite from what may lurk beyond their confines.
It takes little imagination to read a Terminator-parodying cyberdog named after his hometown as a jibe toward the place. Park understood this, “I really thought that it would wind people up in Preston, naming the evil character after my hometown. But it didn’t, they thought it was a great compliment.” Was naming the villain intended to irritate Prestonians? An elusive satire? The cyberdog’s actions provide plenty of evidence for this tease. The mutt sabotages Gromit’s creative practice in window cleaning, purely for his own delight, leaving him bouncing on his bungee cord. Is there a more familiar scene than between a bully and someone who experiments with new processes? Processes like moving puppets a fraction at a time, photographing each minuscule gesture and stitching those frames together to make a film? To me, the name of the cyberdog feels like an inside joke just subtle enough to avoid the editor’s snip. A joke by a soft and sensitive soul who felt unsafe when they lived here, and irritated by the audacious way the place clings to the coat-tails of their creations.
Back at the statue bench financed by the Towns Fund Board and designed by Park, I read the newspaper over Gromit’s shoulder as I pop the last crust of sausage roll into my mouth. On it, there’s a wedge of cheese, a tribute to Peter Sallis, and an article dedicated to Park himself… but no cyberdog. Surely the artist hasn’t sidestepped the issue while planning this statue? I move around Gromit, scanning the paper. Finally I find Preston, a small image tucked away on the back page. He appears to play for North End these days and is lifting a trophy over his head. He has all his fur, a pleasant smile and a bunch of cheering doggy friends around him. He’s had quite the PR makeover and it’s not how I remember him at all. He used to be savage, ferocious, abominable. Now every shred of monster has been smoothed away. Clearly, a choice has been made: the cyberdog in his most distinguishable form was undesirable, but whether the choice was made by Aardman or Preston City Council is unclear. Both have their professional identity at stake in the depiction of Preston within the metal. For Park, it’s the preservation and cohesion of intellectual property under the corporate umbrella of Aardman. In parallel, I doubt PPC wants their investments projecting an image of thuggish machismo. Which, to be frank, is quite disappointing. A panel with a more creatively nourished mindset may have relished the opportunity for the City to play the villain. The removal of all essential characteristics strikes as either humour bypass or an impersonation cutting too close to the bone.
Preston has never needed an excuse to lap up the values of a neoliberal mindset: the creation of wealth and flaunting of status, all while disregarding the cost to its arts and cultural scene. So it’s unsurprising money released by the Towns Fund Strategic Board has been pumped into a project with the goal of increasing high street footfall to stimulate economic growth. Projects likely to be funded by the City must be fool-proof in their ability to generate economic return. This actuality is a contributing factor to Preston’s position on lists of places with poor cultural investment. Sanctioned projects and their economic obligations end up unpalatable to those with critical eyes, and so each time funding bodies reach for financial return rather than the cultural, the problem perpetuates itself further. The lack of locally funded resources for the artistic community in Preston detached from wealth building incentives undermines what worth creativity brings to people in our society, much like the cyberdog’s subversion of the bungee-cord window-cleaning performance.
Before I encountered this statue, I considered the artistic kinship I found in Preston’s on screen personification to be an attribution of my own experience to the character. It’s the censorship in the metal which validates this reading. It is not a coincidence opportunism and an acquisitive nature can be seen in the cyberdog. When Preston sneaks into the basement, he finds the “Knit-O-Matic” and lays claim to Wallace’s invention. He builds a replica from the stolen plans for his dog food factory, including his own more malevolent addition, the “Mutton-O-Matic”. Preston diminishes all of the imagination work and artistic experiments until he finds something to serve his own ambitions. The City loves to brandish Park as a real Prestonian, seizing his elite status in spite of its arm’s length distance in prior work. Two years previous, a firm and dissociating statement had been positioned in the address on the letters resting on the doormat in The Wrong Trousers. Disregarding this assertion, and oblivious to its own neglectful attitude towards creative practice, Preston has dug its claws deep into its own self-serving narrative. The cyberdog feels a very clear, very definite, and very sincere “Fuck you!”
Art emboldens people to embrace the full spectrum of their feelings, regardless of whether or not they are lucrative, or for that matter, positive. Preston the cyberdog contrasts the quaint world Wallace and Gromit inhabit. He’s a representation of undesirable and distinctly real behaviours. It’s these very characteristics which make him unmarketable, unable to fit the ideal account of Park’s connection to Preston. Adapting to a shiny new purpose has left him sanitised beyond the candidness we find rendered in clay. Capitalist values do not compute criticism because positive reinforcement is a functional way to encourage spending. As such, the portrayal of sincere, gritty everyday life in art is a resistive and necessary act against societal homogenisation. The incitement to ignore undesirable aspects of our humanity is a command to behave more formulaically, mechanically, robotically.
Practicing art in private space the way Park did while he lived here is so familiar to me it’s almost colloquial, so it’s hardly a surprise that feeling disconnected from the creative community is a common theme when chatting to artists here. Fortunately, there have been a number of artist-led spaces started in the past few years focused on nurturing the web of practitioners who frequent the City. SHOP is a small exhibition space leasing the room to artists and collectives for short periods. Since The Birley studios launched their public program, resident artists have welcomed people into its gallery and workshop space. TODAY is a program run from the front window of a house in Avenham showing small works facing onto the road. In the past year I’ve attended exhibitions in empty shops, a pop-up expo in a bar, spoken word nights, a poetry pub crawl, a dance performance in church, even a show hosted in someone’s dining room available to view by appointment. Preston has a pulse: it’s made of flesh and bone and feelings.
The Wallace & Gromit Bench is one of a number of projects for the regeneration of the Harris Quarter. Although the City claims to have aspirations of “A diverse and thriving culture”, in the Towns Fund Investment Plan it cannot spare a sentence to disconnect this goal from its machine-like, mono- purpose of a “retail and leisure offer [that] will provide incentive for further development investment”. In this document, it acknowledges The Larder (a cafe dedicated to providing communal space for artists and performers) and The Birley were both spaces of cultural interest existing within the area, but beyond stating they operate within council-owned buildings, the report is ambivalent at best about their continuation. The plan focuses on constructing lots of new buildings, the renewal of council-owned assets and developing new projects suggested to or by the board.
As part of the regeneration project, the main cultural institution in the city, The Harris Museum and Gallery, closed for refurbishment in 2021 and remains shut at time of writing. Funds were set aside to deliver artistic projects in its absence which would have been a great opportunity to support the work local art practitioners already do. Instead, these organic offerings are relentlessly compromised by the agenda of the Investment Plan – The Larder did not survive the COVID lockdowns and its host building is now being absorbed into the hierarchical delivery of culture for the area. By overlooking creative projects and practitioners they do not consider reputationally or monetarily worthy of support, contrary to what the Preston Partnership claims in their brochure, this way of working highlights a focus on regeneration at the expense of culture.
The reason the places previously mentioned are appealing to arts practitioners is they hold time and space for artists to follow their inclinations, the very same resources Park needed when his creative practice was emerging. He didn’t know he’d become an innovator in clay stop-motion animation, he’d merely followed the artistic urge to create something out of joy. Park was fortunate to find the resources he needed to tend that inclination within his family home until he was old enough to move somewhere providing them more broadly. Being able to make art with any depth of meaning is dependent on being untethered to rigid governance and the persistent disregard of this wisdom has been happening for generations. The neglect artists face here is not accidental, it is a wilful inability to relinquish absolute control and support the culture to grow organically.
I place the paper from my sausage roll over phoney Preston and pals, and with a wax crayon from my pocket I methodically rub over the stand-in for the monster the City has conspired to hide. The attributes of Preston the cyberdog are reflective of the hum of discontent existing in the art scene here today. I recognise the growl of the hound whenever confronted by the sovereignty of Prestonian pride and understand it to be superficial and hollow. We ought to take this caricature on the chin, and adapt to support artists who are emerging locally. The K9-T1000 is the tribute we were gifted by the artist, and a bestowal that remains unacknowledged or avoided.
Vengeance Most Fowl aired on Christmas Day 2024 and 62 West Wallaby Street features once again on the front of a letter. This time, the first and single line is the extent of the address, Wigan absent. If this were a standalone film, the set location once again returns to an ambiguous Lancashire. Perhaps time has healed old wounds for Park, perhaps the monetary exchange between Aardman and Preston City Council has forced his hand, or perhaps I am barking up the wrong tree and the complex inferences I’ve been describing are all a projection of my own perceptions. Be that as it may, the original qualities denoted in the cyberdog continue to have real effects for myself and for other creative people who live and practice here. I find camaraderie and affinity within the personification, regardless of the creator’s intentions.
Our city is in a state of deep malfunction, and Wendolene’s knock to the head won’t cut the mustard. We will not be turned into dog meat! It is Shaun, the lamb following his own agency, who makes the decision to act and end the dominion. After all, Preston’s launch through a sheep mangler was a perfectly happy ending for the whole gang, including the lobotomised pooch.
Editor’s Note
On the 20th of February 2025, shortly after this essay was written, Nick Park unveiled a new bronze statue of Feathers McGraw to coincide with the opening of Preston’s new cinema complex.
photograph – Jonny Cosmo
The above essay was first published in print. Each print copy came with one of two hundred original rubbings taken from Preston’s Wallace & Gromit statue, each of which crayon-ed by author Hannah Browne on the 22nd of February 2025 between 9am and 5pm.
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