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."
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