However, the museum in Preston is not to be much longer as a decision has now been taken to move the main museum collections to the under utilised Urbis exhibition building in Manchester city centre. With a collection of football memorabilia dedicated to the birthplace of the game and unmatched elsewhere, we went to Deepdale to see the collection before the move takes place.

Exhibits in the museum include some of the most noted football items anywhere. The collections include the 1966 World Cup final ball; Bobby Moore’s cotton shirt from the legendary England-Brazil match in Mexico 1970 and Stanley Matthews’ Blackpool kit from the 1953 FA Cup final.

The move to the Urbis Cultural centre in Manchester has though now been rubber stamped by the museum trustees in association with Manchester City Council. Proud Preston has become Poor Preston as the Lancashire town is left to contemplate a period of transformation and reorganisation with respect to what is left behind. Despite opposition from local Preston and Lancashire councils, the city is going to be left with only minimal museum collections once the new Urbis museum reopens as the main site of the new football museum in summer 2011.

Visitor numbers are certainly a problem for the museum as things currently stand. A provincial city, visitor numbers to the museum are said to currently number around 100,000 a year. Moreover, Preston gets very little in the way of tourists let alone football tourists, instead it makes it name being an Rail interchange to just about anywhere else in the North West. Today, the interiors of the museum are geared up for visits of school children on organised trips to pad out visitor numbers. Staff inside look bored and under utilised whilst the items for sale sees a shop that is under performing. Like a Premiership footballer at a lower league club, essentially all this means is that the museum and its displays are not being seen by not nearly enough people.  Potential of a great resource is being under utilised.

With the movement of the main National Football Museum to Manchester visitor numbers are projected to increase to 400,000 visitors every year. With Manchester United and Manchester City regularly in European football, visitors to Manchester will have a cultural hive of football memorabilia to enjoy.   Manchester is also a city with football in its blood unlike Preston which is home to an esteemed historical club but also one that is firmly rooted in the Championship. Manchester today meanwhile has went from urban inner city squalor to one that is established as one of the country’s leading visitor destinations outside London.

The museums move to Urbis will see it expand to include more interactive exhibits and soccer-themed events. Moreover with the museum slightly stale in Preston, its arrival in Manchester will ensure a more sustainable and creative future for the collections with specialists using established creative expertise to reinterpret the football story as part of popular culture in a more imaginative and interactive way than is currently the case.

The Urbis development has been much criticized and under used since it was opened to the public. Promoted as a place of artistic and cultural heights, its exhibits have been dismissed easily whilst they have also never been promoted or supported properly. Dismissed as a 'white elephant' space within a distinctive building will be better used with the football museum.

Urbis is an exhibition centre based around explorations of city life, design, urban space and social change. With five floors of changing exhibitions there is a better home for the collections in Manchester compared to the provincial nature of its current base in Preston.

Museums should offer unique insights into everyday life, history and culture but in Preston the potential to achieve this could never be fulfilled.