In Piccadilly Gardens 2007 remembering Piccadilly Gardens 1974
I’m sitting here in Kro Bar, located on the ground floor of the office building Number One Piccadilly Gardens, built on the Portland Street end of the gardens around 2002.
Around me are today’s young people and not so young people out for a night of drinking, partying, clubbing, carousing, boozing in Manchester 2007. Kro Bar is nothing like the watering holes of the old Manchester: Marble floors, minimalist walls, backlit opalescent screens, with a views out on all sides through plate glass windows.
It’s 23.40 and the bar is not only open but looks as if it will stay open until… who knows when. It’s not too crowded, ‘chilled out’ in today’s language.
Replay the video back to 1974 when I used to come here as a 16 year old on nights out with school friends including girl friends from St Joseph’s Technical school for girls, on the site of which I currently live.
Piccadilly Gardens was still a magnificent square, with a wide, open airy feeling. The exact spot where I’m sitting was in the middle of a flower bed. The concrete bus station, built in 1958 demolished 1992, stretched the full length of Parker St on the west side of the gardens. That’s where I used to get off the bus, and meet Carol and her friend Tib next to the statue of Queen Victoria.
Then it would be the Portland Bars – or maybe the Shakespeare – and later Pips or Placemates. All flared trousers, floral frocks and the excitement of cheap perfume. The music was Barry White, maybe Roxy Music.
To take us home at the end of the night, there were all night buses, but they stopped at 2am. Piccadilly could be a threatening place around that time, as people spilled out of the night clubs, queueing for taxis or the orange Selnec buses, which then had conductors.
To me, Manchester felt exciting, glitzy, faintly glamorous, but also grimy and rough. Today it’s a bit more glitzy and glamorous and superficially sophisticated, but underneath, it’s still rough.
It’s fascinating to see the latest crop of young people in their fashions, stepping out for the first time as I once did. With each cycle of a year the fashions change imperceptibly. Today there is not overriding fashion, it all seems to be just… casual. The boys, some of them, have feathery hairstyles. The girls wear less.
The old Piccadilly Gardens have gone, but they are still there in my mind. I just ignore the new ones, they are simply irrelevant.
I feel no nostalgia. In many ways today is much easier. I just like to compare Piccadilly, then and now, before and after. This moment in 2007, that moment in 1974. There doesn’t seem much space in between. Manchester may have changed enormously in a superficial sense, but in many other ways, it hasn’t changed at all.
Uploaded from the Portland St end of Piccadilly Gardens, inside Kro Bar, 23.51 Saturday 20 October 2007.
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