Piccadilly Gardens almost had an Eiffel Tower among other redevelopment ideas

Over the years, Piccadilly Gardens has seen many transformations, with other redevelopment plans that never happened, including almost having an Eiffel Tower.

Once occupied by water-filled clay pits, then the old Manchester Royal Infirmary and even a lunatic asylum, but after several unrealised plans it eventually became a beautiful sunken garden and was given a fountain centrepiece.

In mediaeval times when it was just a barren wasteland filled with boggy clay pits known as ‘Daub Holes’, it was used as a place to publicly shame mainly women accused of being ‘witches’.

Women who were considered outspoken, non-conformist or who bore children out of wedlock were dunked into these filthy 615-foot-long pits.

It seems the site has alway been a bizarre sort of place right from the beginning and anything constructed there is built on some kind of ley lines.

After the land was donated to the city for public use, it became home to a huge pond with the Manchester Royal Infirmary being built there in 1755, followed by a mental asylum right next to it in 1763.

Many casualties of the Peterloo Massacre were also treated here.

Eventually, in 1849 the asylum moved to become what is now Cheadle Royal Hospital and the MRI relocated to its home on Oxford Road in 1908.

Following the demolition of the hospital, the site’s fate became uncertain for several years with various plans that never came to fruition.

One of the interesting ideas for the empty space — considered ‘the heart of the city’ — was a huge Eiffel Tower-esque base structure with an impressive manor house to sit on the top of it.

This would have been a really weird and wonderful building to have witnessed but sadly, it wasn’t to be.

The empty space was left with an identity crisis, before being landscaped with a sunken garden with grass, benches and flowers — a nice green space to break up the growing industrial metropolis. This was perhaps its most popular reincarnation to date.

Transport interchanges were built in the area in the 1930s which eventually became the bus depot and Metrolink stop we know today.

Another strange use – what’s not strange in Piccadilly Gardens at this point? – was during the 1940s and 50s, when part of the area was used as allotments.

Workers would tend to their vegetables while visitors would take a leisurely stroll around the garden grounds or sunbathe in deck chairs.

However, over the years it became an attraction for alcoholism and drug use, becoming the part of town many would try to avoid where possible.

After the 1996 IRA bombing, the city underwent an urban renewal programme and the gardens were replaced with flat land, fountains that spat out from the ground. It also gained a concrete slab nicknamed the ‘Berlin Wall’.

The wall has now been knocked down but Piccadilly Gardens is still lacking an identity. Let’s hope this eyesore of a ‘no man’s land’ is given a better use than the mere magnet for pigeons it is at present. Let’s give Manchester the Piccadilly Gardens the glow-up it deserves.

Let us know what you think Piccadilly Gardens should become?