A much-loved jeweller in Preston is hanging up his mandrels after 44 years in the city centre.
Peter Jackson is 62 and first opened his shop at St George’s Shopping Centre in 1982. Now, in 2026, he wants to spend more time with his family, which now includes grandchildren, after years dedicated to his business.
Not many people are fortunate enough to land in the trade that they happen to be brilliant at, but Peter has been working in the jewellery trade in some form ever since he was 15 – and around it even before then.
Read more: Former headteacher running three marathons in two weeks to celebrate amazing daughter’s life
He was brought up in St Annes and went to school in Blackpool. His mother ran a secretarial agency and his dad was in the motor business.
He told Blog Preston: “I started work when I was 12. Just going to help my father at the office or whatever else it might be.
“My mother’s family were in the jewellery business and I soon realised that I liked jewellery more than I liked cars. So I would help my grandfather in the office. They had a mug tree and they’d get deliveries of silver necklaces, and my job would be to untangle them and hang them, ready to separate.”
Inevitably, we ask what business his grandfather ran.
He adds: “It was called Beaverbrooks. My grandfather was the chairman.”
Peter left school at the age of 15 to work at Beaverbrook and found it to be a good fit – right up until he wanted to have a little more control. But he learned on the job – especially how to deal with customers.
He said: “If ever a customer came in with a complaint, I’d go and stand behind the manager while they dealt with it because I wanted to learn so that I could deal with them next time.
“After a few years I decided I was unemployable and wanted to do things my way. A jewellery shop in Preston came up for sale and I managed to convince everyone, at only 18, to back me. I borrowed some money from the bank and from my parents and off we went.”
Peter Jackson The Jeweller opened at St George’s Shopping Centre in 1982. Blackburn followed in 1988. Now-closed stores also opened in Southport in 1999 (opened by both the Red Arrows and Blue Eagles), Carlisle in 2002 and Bury in 2010.
Unsurprisingly, he points to being a part of people’s special occasions – engagements, graduations and so on – as one of the best parts of the job.
He said: “I love being a part of people’s special occasions. And we built up a reputation for customer service that was always so important to me. I want people to leave the shop saying ‘wow, that was amazing.’
“I was never going to go into the family business – I wanted to do my own thing. The corporate world isn’t the same as it was. I’ve always stuck to core principles. And the people in the store are so important and the relationship I have with them is so important.”
Buying jewellery can be quite a personal experience. It can also vary from modest to life-changingly expensive depending on what you are looking at. As you might expect, the shift to the Internet is the biggest change that’s happened in the 44 years of trading.
For a while, the business had a website but Peter refused to sell over the internet. A website existed to tell the story behind what they did, but didn’t sell anything.
He said: “Nobody ever thought people would buy jewellery over the internet. We’re in quite a personal business. I wouldn’t allow our jewellery to be sold without the contact because it was so important to sit down with the customer. To explain why one watch is £200 and another is £2,000.
“Over time, habits change and the amount of money people spend online is absolutely staggering and I realised it was something we had to offer. I don’t like selling online because I want people to have a personal service. I want people to enjoy the process of buying something.
“We had an elderly couple in with their granddaughter recently and she had been blown away round the corner in H&M because she was able to touch the clothes before she’d bought them. She’d never seen a changing room.”
“I wonder if things will go full circle and people will start to appreciate it again.”
He thinks that the way that businesses can counteract the shift to the Internet is by providing a service they can’t get online. Anyone who is selling a product cannot beat the Internet for convenience – but so many things cannot be replicated online.
He said: “We’ve had to face up to challenges but customer service has been so important. I’ve got a phrase called ‘Raving Fan’. And that’s when someone is so blown away by their experience that they feel obliged to write to me and tell me about it.
“I regularly get emails like this from people who enjoyed the service. These are then people who will talk about us at the dinner table. And if you delight people, they become the best form of advertising you have. Because they tell everyone.
“And whenever anyone writes to me and mentions a member of staff, that member of staff gets a £50 note.”
There have been recognisable faces become loyal customers over four decades. As time has passed, they have become less recognisable to Peter himself – something his mother once found out herself in the 90s.
Peter said: “My mother was in the shop in Blackburn one day and some scruffy oik came in and said he was looking for gold earrings. My mother brought some lower-priced gold earrings out to show him – and we say we must never make assumptions about customers.
“One of the staff kicked her under the table and said it’s Alan Shearer. My mother asked who he was.
“People come in and we don’t even know who they are. The people who are celebrities today might be people who are on TikTok or on reality TV – people I’ve never heard of.
“My daughter was absolutely mortified that Molly-Mae [Hague] had been in our shop and I hadn’t a clue who she was.”
In 2012, Peter Jackson was awarded an MBE for his charity work. He said that he expects the honour came as a result of his work with the Prince’s Trust (now the King’s Trust).
But he does think that it was something taught to him from a young age as being important.
He said: “There are a lot of businesses that just give money to charity so they can shout about it. But my father always taught me that it’s important to help people less fortunate.
“He was involved with the St Annes Coordination of Charities. At Christmas, they would put an advert in the paper and put on a lunch at the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool for anyone who would be on their own. So Christmas Day, we’d drive there and pick up people from their homes. One lady said it was her first time out of the house since the year before. We’d have about 100 people with silly hats laughing and joking. It was hugely rewarding and I was only 12. It was in me from a very early age.”
Aside from that, he was a trustee of Trinity Hospice in Blackpool and worked with charities in the wider North West area. When the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation, a Liverpool-based charity, wanted to make connections in London, Peter helped to organise a dinner in the House of Lords dining room to allow them to make the introductions and contacts that they needed to.
We eventually move onto the topic of Preston city centre and St George’s Shopping Centre and some of the conversation moves into ‘off the record’ territory. It is no secret that there are empty units across Preston – just check the comments of any Blog Preston story in the city centre.
He said: “What I will say is that St George’s is lacking in investment and it’s the heart of the city. It really needs some tender loving care. But the city has changed hugely from having two department stores.
“I think that the local authority should be working harder to encourage new tenants and shops in the city. Okay yes, there are maybe too many chicken shops but at least they’re busy and taking over units that are otherwise empty.
“When the Trafford Centre first opened – it should never have opened – it killed all of the towns around it. But in Altrincham they were brave enough to do something different and it’s fabulous.
“So Preston just needs alternative and smart thinking and I’m afraid we don’t always get that from our politicians.
“It just needs different thinking. And it’s definitely not unique to Preston. But why don’t Preston North End have a presence in the city centre?”
There is, at the time of writing, no concrete plan for what happens to Peter Jackson the Jeweller in Preston. He is not sure himself when he will actually officially retire.
But he said he won’t be tempted into changing his mind – he will retire. He wants to spend more time with his family and travel more for pleasure rather than business. He said it’s feasible the shops could be taken over by another jeweller – but they would need to share his business views and goals.
He said: “I genuinely don’t know what I’m going to do next but I’ll figure something out.”
Support Blog Preston: Keep our community reporting going and view the website without any adverts too. Sign up for a membership today.
Stay updated: Keep in touch directly with the latest headlines from Blog Preston, join our WhatsApp channel and subscribe for our twice-a-week email newsletter. Both free and direct to your phone and inbox. Help us report too, by contacting us if you see something we should be reporting on.
Read more: See the latest Preston news and headlines
