Piccadilly Gardens is one of Manchester’s most important city-centre spaces, but for a first-time visitor it can be a challenging place to relax. The gardens are expected to fully reopen in summer 2027 following a £25 million regeneration project.
A Manchester bucket list begins
Liam De Brún, a TV and Celebrity writer at the Manchester Evening News, has lived in Liverpool for two years, just 30 minutes by train from Manchester. Despite working for the Manchester Evening News since February last year, he had only visited the office in Hollinwood and the Arndale Shopping Centre before this trip.
Determined to change his routine, he set himself a Manchester bucket list and chose Piccadilly Gardens as his first destination, planning a quiet afternoon of reading. His colleagues reacted with confusion, asking “why”.
Having lived in Dublin for nearly a decade, parks and gardens have always meant a lot to him. During the pandemic, he found comfort in quiet green spaces, and he hoped Piccadilly Gardens would offer similar calm away from the city centre’s hustle and bustle.
Walls, noise and pigeons
Armed with a notebook, backpack and Bob Mortimer’s book The Long Shoe, he took the tram to Exchange Square and used Google Maps to find the gardens. He was met with a giant wall blocking the area, which left him confused and repeatedly refreshing his map.
He had set himself the challenge of turning off his phone for two hours, from 3pm to 5pm. He did three laps of the gardens looking for a quiet spot, but found none. He noted that no one was sitting on the grass, despite the sun shining for most of the day. He sat on the stone wall like everyone else, but found it hard to read with loud trams, buses and sirens echoing from all angles.
Vape smoke floating in the air also made it difficult to get fresh air. He described people sitting beside him blowing “cotton candy smoke” into their shared surroundings.
Originally from Donegal, where he was raised in a house up a mountain with only cows and sheep around, he admitted he is now scared of pigeons. “Piccadilly Gardens has more pigeons than people, they’re everywhere!” he wrote. At one point, a person throwing breadcrumbs caused pigeons to fly near his head, and he had to put his book away. In 90 minutes, he only managed to read 57 pages.
Community and regeneration
During his last half hour, he walked around and listened to visitors’ small talk. One man in a high-vis jacket said: “it’s a nice place but they need to do more with it.” Another woman told her friend: “this place is kind of depressing.”
He also spoke to a young man named Dan, from Preston, who had set up a little table with a typewriter as part of a new travelling poetry venture. Asked why he came to the gardens, Dan said: “It would be nice if it was a bit bigger, said it’s nice to help people get mementos about Manchester.”
The writer reflected that community is what makes places worth returning to, not the books read or the scenery. He plans to give Piccadilly Gardens a second chance once the work is complete, though he doubts he will ever be comfortable with the pigeons, even if the gardens become the most beautiful location Manchester has to offer.
