Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester city centre is a busy area with a lot of foot traffic due to its position right next to Manchester Piccadilly railway station.
Visitors to the city often travel through the gardens, and recently it has hosted multiple events such as a Euro's fan zone, the Christmas markets, and a New Year's countdown.
Despite being a central location, Piccadilly Gardens is a controversial space in the city centre, and there have been many reports of crime and antisocial behaviour in the area, with some people suggesting they feel unsafe.
We asked people in Manchester their thoughts.
Visitors to the city often travel through the gardens, and recently it has hosted multiple events such as a Euro's fan zone, the Christmas markets, and a New Year's countdown.
Despite being a central location, Piccadilly Gardens is a controversial space in the city centre, and there have been many reports of crime and antisocial behaviour in the area, with some people suggesting they feel unsafe.
We asked people in Manchester their thoughts.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester's city centre is a busy area with a lot of foot traffic due
00:05 to its position right next to Manchester Piccadilly Railway Station.
00:09 Visitors to the city often travel through the gardens and recently it has played host to
00:14 multiple events such as a Euros Fan Zone, the Christmas Markets and a New Year's Countdown.
00:20 Despite being a central location, Piccadilly Gardens is a controversial space in the city
00:25 centre and there have been many reports of crime and anti-social behaviour in the area,
00:30 with some people suggesting they feel unsafe. We asked people in Manchester for their thoughts.
00:36 "I really don't like it, I avoid it as much as I can. It never really feels very safe around there
00:42 and I just think it always looks a bit of a mess and I always think it's a shame because it's
00:48 for people coming into the city from Piccadilly Station, it's not a great welcome to Manchester
00:54 and I don't think it really shows what Manchester is about. I know they've tried to do a lot of
00:59 stuff on it before to improve it but I don't think they've ever really got it right. It would be nice
01:03 to have a nice green space in the centre where you can meet and it feels safe and it's the centre of
01:12 the whole city really with the station, with the shopping, top of Market Street, it should really
01:18 be a lot better than what it is currently." "Well I mean I think it's quite dangerous,
01:22 I really don't like to walk because there's a lot of people sometimes smoking marijuana
01:28 or you know you see these people who are obviously dangerous so I really don't like to
01:33 walk around. It's definitely dirty and honestly when I'm walking I'm trying to hold my bag
01:38 and try to be safe, it's not the best area." "It's not somewhere that we would go at the moment."
01:45 "Try and walk through it as fast as possible, to be honest at the minute, but
01:51 yeah if they made it a bit nicer then it might be somewhere that we'd go." "It'd be much better
01:55 if they did a bit of a transformation I think. I feel all right with Dave but if I was on my own I
02:00 think I would feel a little bit like wary." "It feels like somewhere that you've just got to walk
02:06 through to get to the train station, like I said we're travelling from out of town so
02:09 yeah that's about it really, we're there." "At the moment it just looked a bit of a mess,
02:15 nothing was open and it just looked like it was under construction. We couldn't really
02:21 suss out what was going on if I'm honest." "When we were children we lived just up the road,
02:25 up Oldham Road from there, near Victoria Flats, Victoria Square and Piccadilly Gardens was our
02:33 playground because in those days Manchester was a concrete jungle, there was no grass, no trees,
02:38 nothing. The only grass we had was on Piccadilly Gardens, we used to go there and play there you
02:44 know. My son got mugged in those gardens some years ago now, had some money taken off him,
02:51 this was just before the days of mobile phones so he didn't have a mobile phone but they had money
02:56 on him and he'd bought some things in the shops and what have you and some lads came and took
03:00 them off him. So yeah there is a history of it, it goes back a long time."