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Back in the early noughties, a team of designers were working on the Piccadilly Gardens the city has grown to loathe. At the same time, a few streets away in the Town Hall there sat a large, faux-fabric book — no leatherbound tome, no mayoral crest on the front — it was essentially a school workbook from Ryman’s. This was the Piccadilly Gardens comments book, a book which members of the public could access freely, and leave their ideas and suggestions on how the future gardens should look.
One week, the council officer in charge of the comments book went on holiday. Perhaps overzealous about the protection of its contents, he locked the book away. At the time the MEN was following the redesign of the old sunken gardens — having increasingly covered antisocial behaviour there — with great interest, and by the time the officer returned, it had made the front page that the designers couldn’t access the comment book. The people were not being heard!
Could it be that crucial insights from the public were never incorporated into the design process? Is it possible that comments such as “please don’t commission a brutalist wall by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, it will never work!” were going unread?
Piccadilly Gardens in all of their beauty. Photo: Dani Cole.
It’s unlikely. More reasonable is that reconciling the opinions of the Mancunian public on a topic like Piccadilly Gardens is impossible. Almost universally disliked, there is no common consensus on what would fix our main public square. It’s a lesson we’re about to learn for the second time in 25 years, as new plans were released last week by LDA Design, the team that won the 2024 competition to lead the redevelopment of the space. It’s the first in a two-step process to rejuvenate the gardens — but what are people making of the plans so far?
A bad brief?
The council’s press release on the new designs promised to “put the gardens back into Piccadilly Gardens,” with the focus on creating a greener, more family-friendly space. The square’s reputation as a gathering point for deliveroo riders, doomsday preachers and the generally wayward has long gotten in the way of it becoming somewhere families want to picnic and relax. There are two ways the new plans intend to repair this reputation: firstly by adding floral displays and greenery (and getting rid of the concrete walls), and then by introducing a new police team, permanently stationed in the gardens.
LDA Design’s staff, despite multiple requests, did not get back to me for an interview about their vision for the gardens and what they hope to achieve. So I consulted other experts. Stephen O’Malley, the chief executive at CIVIC, a civil engineering consultancy based in the city, tells me that he sees the plans as a positive step forward — but still he has his reservations. “I hope they manage expectations that there is going to be a big-bang solution” he says, adding that many of the garden’s issues stem not from its design, but from “deep-rooted systemic issues: unemployment, mental health issues, social care issues.” In this vein, the increased policing presence will be a necessity. Onlooking designers and planners agree that Piccadilly is a challenging brief. One speaking off the record referred to the opportunity to redesign the gardens as “a poisoned chalice” .
Projections released by LDA Design. Photo: LDA Design.
LDA only released three images of their envisioned design: photographs of lush greenery, with families picnicking and friends embracing. Based on the photos, it looks like the central walkway connecting the bus interchange to Oldham Street will remain in situ, but surrounded by expanded lawn space. The current lawn on the garden lives a tortured existence, reduced to a bog in the rainier seasons, dried to a dust bowl in summer and clotted with Christmas markets in winter. One designer I spoke to from another firm remembers seeing the images and thinking: “More lawn? Already it seems like the lawn is something that fails.”
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Whether the new gardens will be better maintained, or not used in the same multifunctional way they currently are – hosting the Christmas markets and various commercial events over the summer – is to be seen. The gardens being brought to ground level (after being sunken in the early 20th century) made it less demarcated from the streets, tramlines and bus interchanges around it. It lacked a sense of serenity — although, as many have pointed out, the serenity and seclusion of the sunken gardens was exploited by petty criminals at the time.
Other design teams couldn’t commit to the amount of lawn and green space the brief asked for. LDA, I’m told by councillors, was the team that best hit the brief and, crucially, stayed in budget.
The interchange
The main goal of the brief to redesign the gardens at the turn of the century was to separate them from the bus interchange, due to the petty crime and antisocial behaviour committed at the station spilling into the city’s main recreational space. It is clear now that this didn’t work. I’m told by sources at the council that other design teams who entered the competition to remake the gardens put forward plans that relocated the interchange and the tram stop.
“That alone would cost millions,” one councillor told me. Martin Stockley — an engineer and design consultant who worked in Manchester in the ‘90s on the masterplanning after the IRA bomb in 1996 — puts it succinctly: “If you have a crap space, bring the buses in. If you have a beautiful space, leave it alone.” Stockley believes the bus stops currently bordering the gardens and filling the interchange should be pushed a few hundred metres back to make space and reduce disruption. “You put the stops in a circumference but you don’t let them right in, because then you’re damaging the central core,” he says.
A tram passing through Piccadilly. Photo: Dani Cole/The Mill.
However, LDA’s designs include a new interchange, which Transport for Greater Manchester are currently working on — though no images for this have been released. Most of the designers I have spoken to agree that the interchange is a big problem for any team trying to turn the gardens into a truly recreational space, because so many of the people passing through the gardens will simply be on their way somewhere else. “It is a root problem for any designer,” the designer from another firm says. “If you sit in that space at 2pm on a Friday, it’s just people transitioning through.”
Should they even be gardens?
When I call Stockley, he happens to be making his way across Centenary Square, in Birmingham. Centenary Square is a vast piazza and mostly paved. “It looks like an international square,” he says, “instead of some…” then allows me to fill in the gap. “Somehow Manchester is locked into the fact it has to have a patch of gardens.”
It is notable that, during the last revamp of the gardens, one of then-council leader Richard Leese’s lines was more green, more trees, more plants. To some it feels we’re doing the same thing again. “We’ve heard loud and clear from Manchester people that they want its appearance to do more to reflect that name,” now-city council leader Bev Craig said in her statement about LDA’s plans. “We’re going to give them more greenery and more flowers.”
Facing away from the bus interchange. Photo: LDA Design.
I asked the council who sat on the panel that selected LDA’s designs, and followed up asking about the public consultations they were drawing on when promising to “put the garden back in the gardens”. I am still waiting to hear back.
Could it be that the city has become too wedded to the name, or the history, of Piccadilly Gardens? Last year my colleague Mollie wrote a big piece about what Mancunians really wanted from Piccadilly, and multiple people — including Stockley when interviewed back then — said it should be paved. The argument is it would make the space more durable, more multi-functional and allow it to be more open and easy to traverse. “Somewhere to relieve the pressure of Market Street,” Stockley says. “Somewhere to let people have some space. Stop trying to tell people where to stand or where to sit.”
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