Welcome to the heart of Manchester city centre – a wide open patch of land struggling to sort itself out. Piccadilly Gardens is not a city square, but it’s certainly not a gardens. You can’t sit here and enjoy some peace and quiet from the hectic city around you. You can’t gather here in any decent number for celebrations, parades, protests or public speaking. It’s hard to flow through on foot, and it doesn’t invite you to sit down. It’s surrounded by buses, tramlines and derelict retail units. And a fence. And it has a concrete wall. And it’s never really been much better in the past either – from slurry pits to lunatic asylums, from ducking stools to suicide.
Please note, this video started as a simple ‘history of’ video until I started filming it. It’s now a long moan with some sarcastic music thrown over the top. Enjoy!
Credit to the Manchester Evening News for a blurry bit of fountain footage halfway through. 😉
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28 Comments
Great video, thanks for saying what so many of us are thinking about this space, there is hope as I understand plans are being submitted for redevelopment of Piccadilly Gardens. Interestingly there is a place in Manchester called Circle Square/Symphony Park near the Uni and its absolutely incredible, such a shame they didn’t put this design in Piccadilly Gardens instead 😅 CWL
Like the Hotels that surround it, Piccadilly Gardens is grim, drab, depressing and full of crackheads.
Old enough to remember the old sunken Picc. Gdns – and without the rose-tinted nostalgia. Rather like how decent enough council tower blocks end up being treated really badly by some residents and 'visitors' and turning into no-go areas, the problem with Picc. Gdns is that it's been taken over by unsavoury types (as Charlie Veitch video will show).
A brilliant summary of the disaster that is the new Piccadilly Gardens. I wish this video could be sent in a time machine back to 1999 when the revamped gardens were announced by Manchester city council. When I opened City Life magazine and saw the plans, I was shocked. I knew then what would happen in the future. I protested along with others but to no avail. It has turned out to be an utter failure and Manchester City Council should apologise for their failure. People say 'we can't go back to the past' – Yes we can, we can recreate the spirit of the original gardens that I remember from my childhood, but using a contemporary design. Sadly after Metrolink arrived, the council let the gardens deteriorate through neglect. Then they said that because the gardens had deteriorated they needed to be totally revamped, but the design they chose was all wrong. The Cleveland design looks fantastic, brilliant that you picked that out. I've also done a comparison of Piccadilly Gardens with another city. Your video is far more outspoken and exhaustive than mine. Well done, well said and many thanks!
I recently found this channel and it is incredible. It’s well researched, well written and appeals to me being a northerner (although technically I’m more a midlander because I was born in Sheffield but raised in Nottinghamshire but 🤫).
Omg! What Piccadilly Gardens needs now is a set of old -fashioned Stocks. In which to place all those responsible for this mess so the public can pelt them with rotten tomatoes for a few days, or perhaps weeks?
Yes
I remember the gardens in the 70s visiting my grans. A lovely place in the heart of the city. Another example if "late stage capitalism "…. greedy avaricious individuals who have no interest whatsoever in the greater good of society. Just the interests as always of the fucking shareholders! We are a doomed species….sorry but its true. We have now gone past our peak and are accelerating on the downward slope.
Good video idea and great execution. What gave you the idea?
I used to cross the proper gardens in the 70s changing buses on my way to speedway every Saturday, jump off the 257 and catch the 210 or 211 to Hyde Road
I wouldn't apologise to the architects. They spent at least 7 years training to come up with that pile of junk.
I love all your vids but this one made me say, "yeah!"
I've never been to Manchester but, back in the 60s, I got interested in my hometown's local history. I became something of an expert on it's story that went back centuries. slowly slowly, bit by bit, the town planners ripped out every vestige of the towns heritage and replaced it with the most ugly, impractical buildings and spaces it could. I moved out and haven't been back for over 40 years. Seems it's happening all over the country. 🙁
It still amazes me that Manchester city council consider the roads around the gardens as a central "bus station" – a sad collection of exposed little bus-stops with sunken and deformed tarmac pavements filled with rainwater. Remove the bus station to the edge of the city – encourage people to walk in to it – change the footfall – it would make a world of difference.
Excellent. Said it for years it is a blight on Manchester
i really dont know what drugs the person was on who decided to build whatever that thing is right now on the grass next to the fountain, really has ruined it even further
I have never been to Manchester but this video was very interesting and well done! Piccadilly Gardens reminds me of Kiener Plaza that was recently redone here in the Lou. The StL Gateway Arch National Park could arguably be considered similar to this as well unfortunately… Sending love to Manchester from St. Louis though. :]
Shame on these stupid councils all over the UK
I think they should also plant some flowers in Piccadily Gardens as well.
I live fairly central to Manchester and always never understood why there aren't enough green spaces here… And one of the first things I learnt here was to avoid Piccadilly gardens at night. I really hope they add some lights and make it a nicer safer place soon.
glad this has been highlighted – it's a s***hole – Council spending a fortune to rebuild the Berlin wall in the heart of Manchester.
Central Manchester has become ugly, run down scruffy and grubby.
I remember when it was a garden and full of flowers/color, in summer it was bustling full of people laying on the grass
I thought overzealous pointless fencing was just a problem of my own city
This video is painfully relatable
I'd be VERY EMBARRASSED if I was from Manchester what a disgusting place 🏴🥃
I'm glad i don't live there anymore. Visited in September and was shocked it got even worse!! Smells of weed at the coffee place and dealers sat about.
Piccadilly Gardens is the perfect indicator of modern Britain. We simply do not organise our cities around liveability, civic collectivism, or any kind of artistic principle. Much like ourselves the public spaces we do have are devoid of culture or any specific identity, and feel more concerned with money than anything else. What could have been a large open space where citizens decide what they want to make out of it has been chipped away by engineers and developers who are only capable of looking at their own rational interest (be that traffic/bus/tram movement, or rental income etc), rather than seeing the value of the space as a whole and as part of Manchester – something the council have also clearly failed to do.
It makes sense that Piccadilly Gardens is so degraded when pretty much every street in central Manchester feels the same. The uplift in wealth the city has seen does not extend beyond some of the glitzy new offices and pay-to-enjoy spaces. The public realm looks like something you might see in Kazakhstan after a few particularly harsh winters, not in the middle of one of Europe's biggest cities. Perhaps as the first industrial nation (and city) – the UK, and Manchester is a sign of things to come for other places, but more plausible is that cities never developed in the British psyche as places for living – the raison d'etre of Manchester, starting in the industrial revolution, was economic output and nothing else. I think that mindset still permeates British society. We still often think of the big cities as places where jobs are and money is, but places that only exist for creating or spending money – we retreat to our dormitory monofunctional suburbs at the end of the day, with such places sprawling around Greater Manchester like some invasive disease.
Even with all the new housing growth in Manchester's city centre, this feels more like a statistic that planners and developers like to brag about, but nobody wants to accept the fact that there is a growing view among the public that they don't want this horrible cocktail of American suburbanisation and British economic decline, and thus the need to radically shift the way we think of our cities, more towards how they are perceived in Spain or France or Germany, goes almost unnoticed by policymakers and councils.
When you build shit, it attracts flies simple as