Piccadilly Gardens looking better (but stop dithering)

A sunny day in early September and in Piccadilly Gardens there was something missing.

Legal & General Asset Management (L&G), the company leasing the laughably monikered ‘pavilions’ in the detested concrete wall in the Gardens, has dropped the grim roof that linked the two food concessions, Bunsik and Blank Street Coffee.

A concrete weight has been lifted. Immediately the area feels and looks better, the mood is easier. 

​The roof had effectively designed in anti-social behaviour and criminality

Meanwhile the bare backsides of the ‘pavilions’ facing the tramlines are being ‘animated’ by lighting installations and an artwork. To quote the L&G press statement: ‘A new feature lighting artwork has also been installed comprising metal, glass and LED lighting designed by SpaceInvader Design and Mancunian artist Lazerian, with lighting specialist Artin. There has also been the addition of new low-level wall artwork installation in the form of applied liquid metal, plus wider external lighting enhancements to the general shopfronts and the pavilion units.’ 

The roof had effectively designed in anti-social behaviour and criminality. It was a mistake from the minute it was constructed in 2002.

The wall was part of the re-design of the Gardens between the celebrated Japanese designer Tadao Ando and the British landscape design company EDAW. Mr Ando never visited the city although one of his partner architects, Hiroshi Araki, managed the trip. The resulting masterplan was messy and the concrete wall idea which was intended to create a barrier between the busy tramlines on Parker Street and the Gardens was clumsy and almost immediately despised.

Even more bizarrely the wall was also supposed to refer aesthetically to the massive 1960s Piccadilly Plaza complex. Architects and landscape designers can be purists and sometimes almost culpably tin-eared thinking they are way beyond (or behind) what a population thinks or feels. I'm hoping Mr Araki wasn’t aware of how people in Manchester felt about Piccadilly Plaza or wasn’t told that this was another of the more despised building ensembles in the city but EDAW should have known. I love the slightly insane Brutalist scale of the Piccadilly Plaza complex and so do others but we remain a very tiny minority even after a resurgence in appreciation of Brutalist architecture over the last decade.  

It's clear EDAW were as much a part of the Gardens' 2002 design as Ando. Ken Alessandro Tani in a contemporary article quotes Jason Prior of EDAW.   

"We developed the design quite a long way before Ando became involved. We sent him the concept drawings asking him to respond, creating a structure to enclose the South West of the Gardens. Ando responded with an elegant simple arc. We had long debates about components and strategy. The Japanese approach to public realm is of course different to the UK. The cultural conditions are different, the level of vandalism for example. I think the Japanese were a bit surprised about how robust the scheme has to be."

The sentence about vandalism is telling, maybe that explains why the 'elegant simple arc' became such a heavy, lumpen and grim wall and the perfect foil for crime. Perhaps it was never to be so 'robust'. 

Tani wrote lyrically about that now demolished connecting roof on the Ando wall. 'The opening in the wall is like a torii, the Japanese wooden trilith, found at the entrance of Shinto shrines.' Shinto, spliffo. 

He went on to say: 'The Gardens represent an important first point of contact for visitors to the city arriving at the railway station... What better invitation to visit Manchester?' 

The passing of time makes fools of us all. I cautiously praised the thing when it first went up.  

Now it's the turn for most of the 2002 design to go, the only question is when.  

The demolition of the connecting roof is part of a more comprehensive plan for the Gardens and the immediate surroundings led by Manchester-based LDA Design. The total area is ten acres in extent, including the streets that border the Gardens, and the budget is £25m.

A Manchester City Council spokesperson said: "Ongoing improvements are taking place to Piccadilly Gardens. We demolished a free-standing section of the unpopular wall, which we owned, in 2020 and now L&G, who own the pavilion structure, have concluded welcome works which remove further sections and also take away the concrete roof between the two sections of the pavilion structure. 

"Intensive police focus on tackling crime and anti-social behaviour in the area through Operation Vulcan, which the council are supporting, is also making a positive difference.

"We are continuing to explore potential design options to further improve the Piccadilly Gardens area, together with partners, such as TfGM and to secure the necessary funding. Consultation with the public will take place before any proposals are brought forward." 

That policing point is important. And neccessary.

However, the last paragraph indicates there's going to be more delay. 

I went back to the City Council and said the wall is one thing, but what about the knackered fountain, the endlessly worn-out lawns, the crime-hiding planters and will the Oldham Street end with the buses be pedestrianised as proposed a few years ago? 

More pertinently: Please, please, please give us a timeframe for the publication of the proposed plans? 

They're ‘being worked on’ came the reply with no certainty as to when we will see the plans aside from vague promises of later this year, as had already been stated by Council Leader Bev Craig in January. It’s September, there’s not much time left. Councillor Pat Karney said to me the plans will be out ‘soonish’. 

Those ‘soonish’ plans are already late and then some. They were supposed to be published by March 2023. It seems with Piccadilly Gardens the city’s famous reputation for being decisive over planning matters has come unstuck.

Insiders in the council tell me they want 'to get it right this time'. It'd be good if they got a bloody move on with the probably impossible notion of getting it right. The removal of the dank and dark ‘pavilion’ connecting roof is welcome but as for the rest, if dithering were a noise we’d have our hands over our ears, screaming.

Read this about the many schemes for Piccadilly Gardens that never happened.

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