GArdeNS twenty years of bloomin’ disasters
AS Manchester city centre booms, a huge space right at its heart is still bust.
Piccadilly Gardens has once again been in the headlines this week, not because of the fountains, or the drugs, or the wall, or another stranded ferris wheel, but because the new grass is having to be immediately torn up due to a council cock-up. Mistakes happen. Yet there have been a hell of a lot of mistakes in Piccadilly Gardens over the last 20 years. And when the rest of the city centre is now surging forward so fast, the area’s perennial failures are, in 2018, becoming harder and harder to swallow.
A flood of major private and public sector investments have seen many of Manchester’s central land and spaces completely overhauled in recent times: St Peter’s Square, Victoria Station, the area around First Street and Home, the Co-op development at Angel Gardens, the former BBC site on Oxford Road.
That’s without the many others in the pipeline, from St Michael’s – off Deansgate – to Albert Square, to the old Granada Studios site, the area around Great Jackson Street and the medieval quarter near Manchester Cathedral.
Yet Piccadilly Gardens, the public area most used – and most complained-about – by Mancunians and visitors alike, has barely changed.
It is four years since an M.E.N. campaign about its endless problems prompted the council to ask for the public’s views on the area, before promising an overhaul.
It is more than two years since the M.E.N. ran a second campaign asking why barely anything had happened. It is nearly one year since proposals for the rebuild of the concrete wall and pavilion were submitted to the council, followed by silence ever since.
And it is roughly 24 hours since the council had to dig up virtually all the grass at the area’s centre after the turf scorched in the bank holiday sun, at a cost to the taxpayer so far unknown.
Piccadilly Gardens seem to be cursed.
The plaza has a long history of difficulties borne out of questionable city planning, its location right next to a transport interchange and the social problems that have dogged the city centre in waves over the past 30-plus years.
Drugs and anti-social behaviour have crept in, died away a little, then surged back. Council revenue funding has withered like town hall turf in May sunshine. More and more people have used the gardens as somewhere to cross through on their way from the bus to Market Street or the train station, as tourists, residents and commuters have soared. But is there another reason, too? Is it also because all those new developments listed above – with their new ‘public realm’ that in some cases isn’t actually publiclyowned – have simply been deemed more important?
Would the catalogue of errors regarding the gardens be allowed to stand in other parts of the city centre?
The wildly unpopular £100m revamp in 2002, for example.
The fountains that have continued to break ever since, costing another £400,000 and a three-year closure to put right following their latest calamity.
The ludicrous situation in summer 2014, when the owner of a huge ferris wheel refused to move it, claiming the