Whitworth Gardens in Manchester

Manchester

Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, is bounded by The Manchester College

The Manchester College

The Manchester College is a further education college in Manchester, England. It opened on 1 August 2008 as the result of a merger between City College Manchester and Manchester College of Arts and Technology to form a 'supercollege'...

 Shena Simon Campus on one side and Whitworth Street

Whitworth Street

Whitworth Street is a street in Manchester, England. It runs between London Road and Oxford Street . West of Oxford Street it becomes Whitworth Street West which then goes as far as Deansgate . It was opened in 1899 and is lined with many large and grand warehouses. It is named after the engineer...

, Sackville Street

Sackville Street (Manchester)

Sackville Street is a street in Manchester city centre, England.-The street:Sackville Street is a street in Manchester city centre. It runs in a northwest-southeast direction and is split into two sections by Whitworth Street, which runs in a northeast-southwest direction. At the northern end of...

 and the Rochdale Canal

Rochdale Canal

The Rochdale Canal is a navigable "broad" canal in northern England, part of the connected system of the canals of Great Britain. The "Rochdale" in its name refers to the town of Rochdale, Greater Manchester, through which the canal passes....

 and Canal Street on the others. The land was purchased by Manchester Corporation

Manchester City Council

Manchester City Council is the local government authority for Manchester, a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. It is composed of 96 councillors, three for each of the 32 electoral wards of Manchester. Currently the council is controlled by the Labour Party and is led by...

 in 1900 and laid out with walks, lawns and flower beds. It was planned as a complement to the new building, the Municipal College of Technology.

Turing memorial

The park contains the Alan Turing

Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...

 memorial statue, which depicts the "father of modern computing" sitting on a bench at a central position in the park. The park was chosen because, "It's got the university science buildings ... on one side and its got all the gay bars on the other side, where apparently he spent most of his evenings".

The statue was unveiled on 23 June, Turing's birthday, in 2001. It was conceived by Richard Humphry, a barrister from Stockport, who set up the Alan Turing Memorial Fund in order to raise the necessary funds. Humphry had come up with the idea of a statue after seeing Hugh Whitemore

Hugh Whitemore

Hugh Whitemore is an English playwright and screenwriter.Whitemore studied for the stage at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he is now a Member of the Council. He began his writing career in British television with both original teleplays and adaptations of classic works by Charles...

's play Breaking the Code

Breaking the Code

Breaking the Code is a 1986 play by Hugh Whitemore about British mathematician Alan Turing, who was a key player in the breaking of the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park during World War II...

starring the actor Sir Derek Jacobi

Derek Jacobi

Sir Derek George Jacobi, CBE is an English actor and film director.A "forceful, commanding stage presence", Jacobi has enjoyed a highly successful stage career, appearing in such stage productions as Hamlet, Uncle Vanya, and Oedipus the King. He received a Tony Award for his performance in...

, and Jacobi became the patron of the fund. Glyn Hughes, an industrial sculptor from Adlington near Westhoughton, was commissioned to sculpt the statue. The Fund eventually raised around £15,000, which was far short of the £50,000 needed to have the statue cast in Britain. No major computer company donated to the fund, which was, according to the sculptor, because Turing was not American. The statue was cast in China

China

Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

.

Turing is shown holding an apple—a symbol classically used to represent forbidden love, as well as being the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the object that inspired Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...

's theory of gravitation, and the means of Turing's own death. The cast bronze bench carries in relief the text 'Alan Mathison Turing 1912-1954', and the motto 'Founder of Computer Science' as it would appear if encoded by an Enigma machine

Enigma machine

An Enigma machine is any of a family of related electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. Enigma was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I...

: 'IEKYF ROMSI ADXUO KVKZC GUBJ'.

A plinth at the statue's feet says 'Father of computer science, mathematician, logician, wartime codebreaker, victim of prejudice'. There is also a Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...

 quotation saying 'Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.' The sculptor buried his old Amstrad

Amstrad

Amstrad is a British electronics company, now wholly owned by BSkyB. As of 2006, Amstrad's main business is manufacturing Sky Digital interactive boxes....

 computer, which was an early popular home computer, under the plinth, as a tribute to "the godfather of all modern computers".
.

Beacon of Hope

The park also contains the "Beacon of Hope", which is the UK's only permanent memorial for people who have, or have suffered from, HIV

HIV

Human immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive...

/AIDS

AIDS

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...

. The sculpture, a decorated steel column designed by Warren Chapman and Jess Boyn-Daniel, was erected in the year 2000.

On World AIDS Day

World AIDS Day

World AIDS Day, observed December 1 every year, is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection. Government and health officials observe the day, often with speeches or forums on the AIDS topics. Since 1995, the President of the United States has made an...

a candlelight vigil generally takes place at the Beacon. For several years the vigil, the traditional closing event of the Manchester Pride LBGT celebration weekend, had been held at the city's Castlefield Arena, but because of the siting of the beacon, it was decided that the vigil should be held in the gardens. Following a highly successful event in 2002, organised by the Village Business Association, George House Trust took control of the vigil for Europride in 2003, in collaboration with Manchester City Council and local HIV/AIDS groups such as Body Positive North West, the Lesbian and Gay Foundation and the Black Health Agency. George House Trust now run the vigil annually at Manchester Pride.

External links

• Manchester City Council's Leisure Department's page for the park
• Glyn Hughes' page on the Turing memorial sculpture
• Sci/Tech Computer's inventor snubbed by industry (BBC News story)
• Computer buried in tribute to genius (Manchester Evening News story)