Piccadilly Gardens Pavilion

After the 1996 IRA bomb, Manchester launched a programme to renew its centre, including a competition to redesign Piccadilly Gardens. In 1998, the winning team brought together the landscape architects EDAW, Arup, Tadao Ando, the local architects Chapman Robinson and a lighting engineer. The garden was rebuilt between 2001 and 2003 at a cost of £20.7 million, and the sunken garden of the 1930s was filled in. Ando contributed a concrete pavilion and wall on the side of the trams and buses.

The wall drew petitions: in 2013 one proposed covering it with greenery, an idea Ando said he was open to; in 2016 another, signed by more than 20,000 residents, called for it to be demolished or transformed. A 2016 plan to replace the pavilion was abandoned. The freestanding part of the wall, which locals had nicknamed the "Berlin Wall", was demolished from 16 November 2020; it belonged to the council, while the pavilion is privately owned, and the pavilion was not part of those works. In 2024 its owner, Legal & General, had the concrete roof linking its two parts removed, to let in light and open up the way through.

The work is a curved concrete wall 130 m long that separates the lawn from the transport interchange. A freestanding wall continued the pavilion's curve, as part of the same design. The whole is in concrete and modernist in look.

The pavilion houses two food outlets.

Piccadilly Gardens is a public space in the centre of Manchester; the pavilion can be walked alongside freely, on the garden side or the tram and bus side.