Ardwick Green is a public space in

Ardwick Ardwick is a district of Manchester in North West England, one mile south east of the city centre. The population of the Ardwick Ward at the 2011 census was 19,250. Historically in Lancashire, by the mid-nineteenth century Ardwick had grown f ...

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

. It began as a private park for the residents of houses surrounding it before Manchester acquired it in 1867 and turned it into a

public park An urban park or metropolitan park, also known as a municipal park (North America) or a public park, public open space, or municipal gardens ( UK), is a park in cities and other incorporated places that offer recreation and green space to r ...

with an ornamental pond and a bandstand. It contains a

cenotaph A cenotaph is an empty tomb or a monument erected in honour of a person or group of people whose remains are elsewhere. It can also be the initial tomb for a person who has since been reinterred elsewhere. Although the vast majority of cenot ...

commemorating the dead of the Eighth Ardwicks, a former unit of the Territorial Army belonging to the

Manchester Regiment The Manchester Regiment was a line infantry regiment of the British Army in existence from 1881 until 1958. The regiment was created during the 1881 Childers Reforms by the amalgamation of the 63rd (West Suffolk) Regiment of Foot and the 96th ...

. The old drill hall at one end of the park is still used by volunteer soldiers. The other end of the park contains a large boulder, a

glacial erratic A glacial erratic is glacially deposited rock differing from the type of rock native to the area in which it rests. Erratics, which take their name from the Latin word ' ("to wander"), are carried by glacial ice, often over distances of hundred ...

. The Church of St Thomas, on the north side of Ardwick Green, was consecrated as a

chapel of ease A chapel of ease (or chapel-of-ease) is a church building other than the parish church, built within the bounds of a parish for the attendance of those who cannot reach the parish church conveniently. Often a chapel of ease is deliberately bu ...

in 1741. It was rebuilt and extended in the course of the late eighteenth century, and acquired a

campanile A bell tower is a tower that contains one or more bells, or that is designed to hold bells even if it has none. Such a tower commonly serves as part of a Christian church, and will contain church bells, but there are also many secular bell tow ...

tower in the 1830s. Many of the grand buildings have been demolished, including the Ardwick Empire Music Hall (later Manchester Hippodrome) at the eastern end. The business premises of Thomas Brown, surveyor and Resident Engineer for the construction of the Peak Forest Canal, were in Manchester and by 1841 he was living in Allerton Place at 16 Ardwick Green. He died here on the 30 January 1850, aged 78 years. Allerton Place was demolished and by 1915 a tyre works had been built on the site.

References

{{Authority control Areas of Manchester Parks and commons in Manchester