WORDS Phil Griffin Is a Writer, Broadcaster and Curator With
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WORDS OTHER GREEN PROJECTS Phil Griffin is a writer, broadcaster and Manchester Garden City is a joint initiative curator with special interest in architecture between design practice BDP and CityCo. and urban issues. With support from Manchester City Council, popupgallerymanchester.com the aim is to deliver a greener, healthier and more vibrant Manchester – a truly 21st century garden city. IMAGES Projects include an urban orchard in St John’s Caroline Johnson studied art in Preston, Gardens, Victoria Street ‘Grow Boxes’, canal- Falmouth and London. She is Manchester’s side planting in Piccadilly Basin, and the city officially appointed Urban Sketcher. centre’s first children’s playground. carolinejohnson.org Simone Ridyard teaches Interior Design at Manchester Metropolitan University. She set up the MMU Urban Sketchers Group. simoneridyard.co.uk Find out more about the Urban Sketchers here urbansketchers.org Manchester’s Parks & Squares HAVEN IN THE CITY 1. Cathedral Gardens Blackfriars Rd Central Retail District 1 Great AncoatsBlossom St St 2. Cutting Room Square 2 Ancoats CorporationMarket St St 3. Parsonage Gardens 3 Central Retail District Old Mill St 4 Piccadilly 5 Gardens 4. Cotton Field Deansgate New Islington i Quay St Ducie St London Rd 5. Piccadilly Basin Portland St 6 Piccadilly 7 Liverpool Rd Fairfield St 6. St. John’s Gardens Sackville St Castlefield Princess St Whitworth St 7. Sackville Gardens Oxford Rd The Gay Village 8. All Saints Gardens Oxford Road Mancunian Way 8 Nothing becomes a city so much as its parks and squares. We can enjoy them and, in whatever ways we can, cherish them. You may choose to eat your lunchtime sandwich, doze or tweet from these places. You may picnic with friends or sit with a book. Or you might just take out a sketchbook and look around you intently. Whatever it is that draws you into these places, you will experience life in the city centre in a different way. We are not always working and shopping, sometimes we might move through the city for the sheer pleasure of it. These are some of the places you might find, stop in, and take great pleasure from. You are most welcome. visitmanchester.com Cathedral Gardens was created in 2002 as part of Manchester’s NS Millennium Quarter. By folding Urbis (now housing the National E Football Museum) around the Corporation Street edge of the site, architect Ian Simpson created a unique glass backdrop to a RD M4 3BG brand new green space in the city. The gardens themselves were designed by Building Design Partnership, following the 1996 IRA GA Bomb. Ironically, it was enemy bombs that first created the entire site in the 1940 Christmas Blitz. DRAL Manchester Cathedral, Corn Exchange, Chetham’s Library and School of Music and Victoria Station bound the Gardens. With HE Manchester Arena just around the corner, and future development AT of the Medieval Quarter and NOMA, this is not about to be an C especially quiet space anytime soon. It will only become more vibrant. From its opening to the present, Cathedral Gardens has been adopted by Moshers, Goths and Emos from all over the city, dress code, Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, a lot of black. People watching, street theatre. A unique space in the city. 1 Corporation St Fernie St Caroline Johnson E If you want an example of visionary regeneration, this is it. Cutting H Room Square, Ancoats, is watched over by five giant monoliths. Each frames an enlarged photograph by Ancoats artist-in-residence, Dan Dubowitz, of the derelict, over-grown spaces where women M4 5A used to cut the paper patterns for the thousands of fabrics and garments that were made here and exported to the world. Royal Mill, where these photographs were taken, is now converted into apartments and people cook, take showers and watch TV where thousands of mill workers turned in for their shift. Cutting Room Square opens on to St Peter’s church. Completed in 1859 this pretty Italianate building was the first Anglican Church in this predominantly Catholic area. A century and a half later it was abandoned, looted and burnt out. Beautifully restored, it is now the CUTTING ROOM SQUAR ROOM CUTTING rehearsal and small performance space for the Hallé symphony orchestra, itself founded in the city just two years prior to the church being built. Look around you. Nowhere in Manchester will give you a stronger sense of the city’s industrial past, and nowhere bears the city’s cultural identity so positively represented. 2 Blossom St Cotton St Simone Ridyard If it wasn’t called Parsonage, it could fittingly be called Harry’s NS Gardens. The Parsonage was of St Mary’s Church, built in E 1753, closed in 1890 when the congregation had abandoned the polluted industrial city centre. The Church was demolished in M3 2LF 1928, as the great white five-storey cruise ship of Arkwright House, by architect Harry S Fairhurst, took up the entire south side. GARD E Harry also designed National House, its neighbour to the west, headquarters building for the National Union of Boilermakers. It was (rather well) converted into flats, along with its 1960s neighbour, also by Fairhurst’s, in 2000. The great Harry Fairhurst, Manchester’s most significant architect after Alfred Waterhouse, also designed Blackfriars House, another bright white Portland stone liner of a building, just a step down the street. PARSONAG Parsonage Gardens is no great work of landscape design; cruciform paths run corner to corner and dissect a small central circle. The plantings aren’t great. Grab a sandwich and an early lunch and head across Deansgate, past Kendal’s, down St Mary’s Street on the next fine day, and discover that even the plainest, least adorned space can be a haven in the city. Deansgate 3 St Mary’s St Caroline Johnson The Ancoats cotton mills made Manchester a global brand. The EE LD sheer cliff face of mills on Redhill Street, looking south across the E Rochdale canal is one backdrop to the city’s newest park. Another is the colourful Chips apartment building by architect Will Alsop, M4 6 sitting on the bank of the Ashton canal. The area is New Islington, and the brand new water and wildlife park, named by popular vote, is Cotton Field. COTTON FI COTTON Orchard, beach, reed-beds, nesting boxes, turning bridges and mooring pontoons. Building in New Islington might have been cruelly stalled by the recession, but life, and nature drives on. Even the outdoors furniture here, whether concrete or timber, has flare and quality. All the moorings are taken and there’s a fragrant year- round community of wood-burning stoves aboard colourful narrow boats. There is no other city centre community, neighbourhood or park quite like it. 4 Old Mill St Great Ancoats St Simone Ridyard Today we’d call it a Transport Hub. Piccadilly Basin was once a G H buzzing interchange of horse drawn barges and drays, cotton bales, coal and all the timber, brick and iron an industrial cauldron could consume. The Rochdale Canal Company offices were on M1 2 Dale Street, in front of Carver’s warehouse, built in 1806, the oldest in the city. The basin was a maze of wharves, docks, pools and moorings, where the Rochdale and Ashton canals meet. Filled in for a car park, the area was a neglected backwater, without much water. There’s still car parking here, but also PICCADILLY BASIN PICCADILLY plantings, footbridges, towpaths and a properly reconstituted waterside. New and refurbished offices, apartments and hotels make this a modern hub of a very different order. Piccadilly Basin is an exciting and historic contribution to Manchester’s open spaces. It anchors the southern margin of the Northern Quarter and links through to Ancoats. Piccadilly Basin is the counter balance to Castlefield. Get there along the Rochdale canal, past the only canal lock in the country that sits beneath a building! Ducie St 5 Dale St Simone Ridyard St John’s Gardens, the park, and the neighbouring 1970s housing H NS development that shares the name, are very like a small corner of E a different city. St John Street, leading down from Deansgate to the park, is Manchester’s last intact Georgian street. Legal, medical and dental moved in years ago and there are no private houses here M15 6B M15 now. However, west of the park, between Byrom Street and Lower Byrom Street, is a congregation of more than a hundred town houses and maisonettes, enclosing four internal gardens. N’S GARD H St John’s church was demolished in the early 1930s. The graveyard that the gardens have replaced had tombstones laid flat, edge- to-edge, like flag stones. The memorial cross tells us that 22,000 ST JO ST people are buried here, which is a number best not to contemplate when enjoying sunlit lunches. John Owens is buried here, founder of the college that became Manchester University. Also, and perhaps more restfully, is William Marsden, campaigner for the Saturday half-day holiday. Rest in peace. Byrom St 6 Camp St Caroline Johnson B This was Whitworth Gardens until a revamp brought in the Beacon NS H of Hope in 2000 and the bronze memorial statue of Alan Turing E by Glyn Hughes a year later. It is now Sackville Gardens, and very much the adopted heart of the Gay Village, being the staging area M1 3 for the annual candle light vigil on 1 December, World Aids Day. This is a space where thinking is allowed. GARD E Held in by the Rochdale canal, former Sheena Simon College, Whitworth Street and the magnificent main building of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, Sackville Gardens looks out onto a uniquely modern recasting of the city.