From public garden to corporate plaza: Piccadilly Gardens and the new civic landscape

Abstract

This essay is an appraisal of a major recent public space redevelopment, seven years after completion. The redevelopment of Piccadilly Gardens forms part of a regeneration masterplan that has reshaped the urban core of this great former industrial city. Based on observation of the Gardens and the way that people use its spaces, it characterizes the design language and experiential qualities of the place. The Gardens’ aesthetic qualities – in particular the use of a ‘motif’ geometry designed to be viewed from above and in reproduced images – relate to the policies that informed the space's redesign. These policies represent an attempt to reinvigorate central Manchester by fashioning it as a marketable location for business, leisure and consumerism – a ‘world class’, ‘twenty-four hour city’. As a major part of the regeneration of central Manchester, the new Gardens have been a success in economic terms – but this has been achieved by an approach that privileges strategic planning priorities over human-scaled design ones. The space now forms an extension of the surrounding urban commercial districts, but this connectivity has brought about the loss of the space as a bounded, contemplative retreat from the city – a ‘garden’ in the original sense of the word.