LOOK at that. We thought it was a wildly late April Fool from the Manchester Evening News.

The three imagined heads are of Noel Gallagher, Ian Brown and Eric Cantona, respectively from Burnage, Altrincham and extreme south Manchester, Marseilles.

Or maybe we'd had too much coffee and cheese and suffered crazed dreams where the world was turned upside down and good taste suddenly mattered for absolutely nothing.

Then as we rubbed our eyes in disbelief we realised this suggestion was for Piccadilly Gardens where ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN. 

Anything. 

So here we have the Manchester Evening News' planning application for 'big heads' of 'Mancs' to be painted on the blank grey of the 'Berlin Wall'. The wall was designed by the practice of acclaimed architect Tadao Ando. 

The three imagined heads are of Noel Gallagher, Ian Brown and Eric Cantona, respectively from Burnage, Altrincham and extreme south Manchester, Marseilles. These heads will be up to three metres high - THREE METRES - and be on both sides of that bit of wall behind the Tree of Remembrance - click here.

The way these are depicted in the planning application document underpinned by a cheesy city skyline would create in Manchester's largest public space at once the most grotesque, tasteless, ridiculous, laughable public art ever attempted (probably) in a British city. 

Yet...

 

Piccadilly Gardens (click here) with its badly designed fountain that never works, its vile and overbearing planters on the north side, its stupid grey wall and its pointless 'lawns' that wear out every year, is sort of perfect for this. 

A few years ago, given the debased nature of the non-gardens, we suggested on Confidential that we might as well go for broke and at least have fun with the space and boost mass tourism. So we said, why not put up statues of famous popular culture figures such as footy players and popsters? A statue of Morrissey, for instance, would have tens of thousands of weeping Smiths fans gathered around it every day taking selfies and crashing the world wide web.

 

So here's the thing, given the sorry state of Piccadilly Gardens, the lack of any clear strategic thinking about it, then why not have these 3m (almost 10ft) faces glaring at passersby?

Again it'll be selfie-tastic, there'll be a few column inches in the nationals, BBC Radio Manchester can do some vox-pops on site, bloggers can blog and the MEN can slap itself on the back with its 'Be proud of Manchester' slogan as shown above. Forget the endless 'firsts' and the 25 Nobel prizewinners, let's have some Eric- from France. Still, as we say, Piccadilly Gardens couldn't be a more apt location for these heads. 

The planning document is here. There are five comments already from Highway Services, Corporate Property, Piccadilly Partnership, City Centre Regeneration and the Ward Councillors. All of these titles are followed by the phrase: 'Comment not available for publication'. 

We asked Tadao Ando, architect of Manchester's 'Berlin Wall' for a comment, and his spokesman, a man of no known occupation, called Bez, said: "It's boss, proper Manchestoh. Top banana. But where's my pic? It's twisting my melon man. Er... I love bees yer know." 

Piccadilly Gardens in the 60s, looking like gardens