Piccadilly Gardens - History

History

• Before 1755: The area was pits called the Daub Holes. They filled with water. The Lord of the Manor donated the site and the pits were replaced by a fine ornamental pond.
• 1755: The Manchester Royal Infirmary was built there; the street it stood on was then called Lever's Row, which continued south-east as Piccadilly.
• 1763: Manchester Royal Lunatic Asylum was built next to the Manchester Royal Infirmary.
• 1849: The lunatic asylum was moved to Cheadle and is now Cheadle Royal Hospital.
• 1910: The Manchester Royal Infirmary moved to its current site on Oxford Road, due to fear of difficulty evacuating in narrow streets in case of fire.
• 1914: By then the infirmary had been fully removed from the site, and after several years in which the City Council tried to decide how to develop the site, it ended up being left and made into the largest open green space in the city centre. The Manchester Public Free Library Reference Department was housed on the site for a number of years before the move to Manchester Central Library. The lowered area (as before 2000) of the gardens arose from the hospital's basement.
• 2000 onwards: The area was completely changed.

The square at Piccadilly Gardens has been for many years the central hub of Manchester's public transport system. The square is only five minutes' walk from the mainline Manchester Piccadilly railway station and 10 minutes walk from Manchester Victoria railway station.

As part of the ongoing post-IRA bomb regeneration of the city centre, the city council had set up an international competition for the redesign of Piccadilly Gardens. The winners – announced in 1998 from a short-list that had been whittled down to six – were the landscape architects EDAW and its partners, consisting of: the engineers Arup; renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando; local architects Chapman Robinson; and lighting engineer, Peter Fink. The square was finally revamped in 2001–02, to include new green space and fountains (by EDAW), and a pavilion (by Tadao Ando) which partially functions to shield the gardens from the transport interchange. At the same time One Piccadilly Gardens was constructed on the eastern edge of the square. The resulting space was radically different from the old gardens, and the only links to the past that remained were the original statues. The redesign was part of the massive construction process that covered Manchester in the build up to the city hosting the 2002 Commonwealth Games. Previously the square was becoming increasingly run down and was considered unsafe. At a contract cost of around £10 million Piccadilly Gardens was renovated and ended up being shortlisted in 2003 for the Better Public Building Award. Part of the area was built on to help fund the redevelopment.