Sackville Gardens

Sackville Gardens is a small public garden on Sackville Street in central Manchester, England, near postcode M1 3BB, beside Canal Street and the Gay Village and about five minutes' walk from Piccadilly station. It is best known for the Alan Turing Memorial, a bronze statue of the mathematician and codebreaker seated on a bench, which honours his wartime work and his pioneering contributions to computer science, work connected with the University of Manchester where he later worked. The statue shows Turing holding an apple and sits within a landscaped space of lawns, seating and planting that offers a calm alternative to the bars and busy streets nearby. The garden is free to visit and open at all times, and a stop takes about fifteen to thirty minutes. It tends to be most peaceful in the morning and on weekday afternoons, while on summer days and around Pride events the surrounding streets are crowded and the garden fills with people resting between visits to Canal Street. The site is overlooked by university buildings of the University of Manchester and sits close to the Rochdale Canal and the canal-side bars. Visitors can reach it on foot from Piccadilly Gardens in about ten minutes, and the Metrolink and bus services around Piccadilly make connections easy. Photographers usually shoot the statue from the front in soft daylight, and there is space to sit and read the plaque. It makes a good short stop on a walk that links Chinatown, Canal Street and the Northern Quarter, and it also gives context to the city's role in the history of computing, which is covered in more depth at the Science and Industry Museum.