Stars in their eyes...

Moor Park in Preston is one of the oldest municipal parks in the North of England. It was enclosed in the 1830s from what had been common land for six hundred years (before that royal forest), and landscaped in the 1860s by Edward Milner, a pupil of Paxton. The improvements included a cricket ground; one of the clubs who played there, 'North End', later moved across the road and switched to football, becoming one of the original members of the Football League.

Preston has one of the oldest Indian and Pakistani communities in England, but some of these guys may be more recent; they were shouting to each other in what I guess was Punjabi, and the one who thanked me for throwing back a loose ball spoke English only haltingly.

The small observatory in the background is named after Jeremiah Horrocks, the seventeenth century astronomer. Although now owned by the university, it was built in 1927 by Preston Council, in the days when local government had ambition. More information (and a better view) here.

This blip is dedicated to the Sunday cricketers, dreaming of Sachin Tendulkar and Imran Khan, and to all the stargazers from Galileo and Kepler down the generations, who have lain on their backs all night thinking not of England, but of universes.