Evaluation
The increased use of the gardens is a measure of the project's great success, and they have become a place where people bring visitors, and families bring children to play in the fountains in fine weather.
Surrounded by the Town Hall, the Millennium Galleries, and the new Winter Gardens (under construction), with shopping and café bars on Pinstone Street and St Paul's Parade and with the prospect of over £100m of commercial investment on the east side, the gardens offer a light and green contrast to the urban heart of the revitalised city-centre. An impressive lighting concept extends the life of both buildings and open space late into the evening and night.
The gardens, sunk around 1.5 to 2m below street level are insulated from the noise of busy Pinstone Street to the west, while the sounds of fountains and water channels predominate within the lower garden and help to reduce external sounds. Three staircases and a well-integrated ramp along the western curved edge of the planted areas provide connections to surrounding streets, leading directly to Pinstone Street, where bus stops link the gardens to the surrounding city.
The gardens are overlooked on all sides by clear fronts, mostly of Victorian commercial buildings, giving strong senses of enclosure, definition and safety to the open space. To the north the space is bounded by a pathway (Cheney Row) with a low wall and small gate, which creates an intimate route leading to the Library, while the continuity of shop fronts gives horizontality to the surrounding 4, 5 and 6 storey buildings and links lower floors to adjacent outdoor spaces.
The gardens are south-facing and the demolition of the modernist Town Hall extension to the east has allowed the area to benefit further from the sun, as well as creating visual continuity with the lower buildings around.
Seating, lighting, street furniture and water features have all been conceived as integral elements of the overall design. The main water features are cast in bronze and have been designed as part of a specially commissioned street furniture which includes the bollards, litter bins and seating in the paved areas. Such high cost and specialist attention to detail and materials are exceptional but the space resonates with local character and reflects the care and thought that went into it.
The gardens benefit from unusually high quality craftsmanship and durable materials that will undoubtedly repay the City's investment in both financial and civic terms. The planting design requires high levels of maintainence and management, which clearly have been pre-planned to ensure that the Peace Gardens will continue the Victorian tradition of horticultural display for which the UK was once famous.
