Piccadilly Gardens application due in spring

Legal & General is targeting a completion date of 2019 for its £10m regeneration of Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens, which is set to include 22,000 sq ft of new restaurant units alongside improvements across the public realm.

In November, L&G announced its plan to demolish the unpopular wall and pavilion, making way for two buildings totalling 22,000 sq ft, either side of a covered section of public realm. The new pavilion will house four ground floor family restaurant units, and on the first floor there will be a restaurant and bar with terrace.

The restaurant operators are expected to be similar to those currently found in the ground floor of nearby One Piccadilly, which houses Pizza Express, Byron Burger, Barburrito, and recent opening Shoryu Ramen. However, for the upper floor bar, L&G is hoping to secure a more high-end occupier, such as a Living Ventures brand.

Manchester City Council is L&G’s partner on the project. The council isn’t putting any money into the scheme, but has released land near to the tram lines to allow for the construction of the larger pavilion.

The council’s ongoing upkeep of the gardens will be funded by income from advertising screens, installed in the pavilion and covered public space.

A public consultation into the proposals opened today.

According to Rob Codling, senior asset manager for L&G, the proposals are due to be reviewed by Manchester City Council’s executive in February, with a target of spring 2017 for the submission of a planning application.

A start on site is planned for 2018, and it is hoped that works to the gardens will have completed by later that year, with the restaurants opening by the beginning of 2019.

L&G acquired the pavilion and wall plot as part of its acquisition of One Piccadilly Gardens from Europa Capital in 2014, for £75m.

A consultation event is taking place today on the ground floor of the Manchester Town Hall Extension until 4pm, and on Saturday 3 December from 10am to 4pm.

Savills is the leisure agent advising L&G.

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How have they managed to come up with something worse than what’s there already?

By Jack

Tawdry.

By Tony Heyes

“The upkeep of the Gardens funded by income from advertising screens”…….. just about sums it up. Yet more visual pollution and intrusion, the lowest common denominator ‘answer’ – Constant invasive fast cut, low attention span moronic advertising for crap shoved in your face through screens.Just like in the post office queue, or the GP’s waiting room, just like every pub you go in, just like around the edges of football pitches, it’s everywhere, and no one who is subjected to it, ever asked for it. The narrowness and laziness of the ‘thinking’ behind this is simply astonishing, and yet, given the lack of consideration for anything that might have merit or refinement being howled down as retrograde and elitist by the Abu Dhabi arms length management team – (Oops! sorry, I mean Manchester City Council of course) then it’s hardly surprising. If one of the first rules of Landscape Architecture is ‘ identify the user’ then I suppose, along with the endless planet destroying burger outlets, sorry again, I mean of course… ‘ restaurants’ – (sic), rather than real shops and businesses selling real quality things; then I suppose they have cracked it. Because let’s face it, nobody designs spaces where older people, or those with half a brain cell who like to read or just enjoy a pleasant urban oasis where you can watch and appreciate the city want to go, you know…like they do in all those backward dreary old towns such as Lyon, Milan, Boston (Mass). Barcelona, Gothenburg, Hamburg, Bruges etc; Jack and Mr Heyes comments above are spot on:- Tawdry, and ‘worse than what exists already’…incredible, but yes, they seem to have done it! Whooo!

By Cassandra

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