Whitworth Gardens (also known as Sackville Park) in Manchester, England, is bounded by the City College Manchester City Campus on one side and Whitworth Street, Sackville Street and the Rochdale Canal and Canal Street on the others. The land was purchased by the Manchester corporation in 1900 and laid out with walks, lawns and flower beds.

The park contains the Alan Turing memorial statute. He is sitting on a bench a central position in the park. The park was chosen for the irony it brought to the statue - on Turing's left is the University of Manchester and on his right is Manchester's gay village.

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 Whitmore 's play Breaking The Code starring Sir Derek Jacobi. Jacobi became the patron of the Fund. Glyn Hughes, an industrial sculptor from Adlington near Westhoughton, was commissioned to sculpt the statute. The Fund eventually raised around £15,000, which was far short of the £50,000 needed to have the statue cast in Britain; not one major computer company donated a penny to the fund. The statue was cast in China.

Turing is shown holding an apple - a symbol classically used to represent forbidden love, as well as being both the fruit of the tree of knowledge (the object that fell on Isaac Newton) and the means of Turing’s own death. 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 quotation saying ‘Mathematics, rightly viewed, posses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.’ It is said that, buried under the plinth, is an old Amstrad computer.

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/AIDS.

The sculpture is by Warren Chapman and Jess Boyn-Daniel and was erected in 2000. It is a steel column with designs.

On World AIDS Day a candlelight vigil generally takes place at the Beacon; in 2003 this was organised in collaboration with Manchester City Council and local HIV/AIDS groups such as the George House Trust, Body Positive North West, the Lesbian and Gay Foundation and the Black Health Agency.

External links

• Manchester City Council's Leisure Department's page for city centre parks
• Glyn Hughes' page on the Turing memorial sculpture
• Sci/Tech Computer's inventor snubbed by industry (BBC News story)